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21 



A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



A HISTORY 

of 

ENGLISH LITERATURE 



FOR STUDENTS 



BY 



ROBERT HUNTINGTON FLETCHER, Ph.D. 

Professor of English Literature, Grinnell College 




BOSTON: RICHARD G. BADGER 

TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK CO., LIMITED 



• t 
Copyright, 1916, by Richard G. Badger 



All Rights Reserved 



6 




Made in the United States of America 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



CLA446072 

~\As6 I 1 



I 






TO MY MOTHER 

TO WHOM I OWE A LIFETIME OF A MOTHER'S MOST 
SELF-SACRIFICING DEVOTION 



PREFACE 

This book aims to provide a general manual of English 
Literature for students in colleges and universities and 
others beyond the high-school age. The first purposes of 
every such book must be to outline the development of 
the literature with due regard to national life, and to give 
appreciative interpretation of the work of the most im- 
portant authors. I have written the present volume be- 
cause I have found no other that, to my mind, combines 
satisfactory accomplishment of these ends with a selec- 
tion of authors sufficiently limited for clearness and with 
adequate accuracy and fulness of details, biographical and 
other. A manual, it seems to me, should supply a sys- 
tematic statement of the important facts, so that the 
greater part of the student's time, in class and without, 
may be left free for the study of the literature itself. 

I hope that the book may prove adaptable to various 
methods and conditions of work. Experience has suggested 
the brief introductory statement of main literary prin- 
ciples, too often taken for granted by teachers, with much 
resulting haziness in the student's mind. The list of as- 
signments and questions at the end is intended, of course 3 
to be freely treated. I hope that the list of available 
inexpensive editions of the chief authors may suggest a 
practical method of providing the material, especially for 
colleges which can provide enough copies for class use. 
Poets, of course, may be satisfactorily read in volumes of 
selections; but to me, at least, a book of brief extracts 
from twenty or a hundred prose authors is an absurdity. 
Perhaps I may venture to add that personally I find it ad- 
visable to pass hastily over the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries and so gain as much time as possible for the 
nineteenth. 

R. H. F. 

August, 1916. 



CONTENTS 



Preliminary. How to Study and Judge 
Literature . . . . 

A Tabular View of English Literature 

Eeference Books ..... 

I. Period I. The Britons and the Anglo 
Saxons. To A.D. 1066 . 

II. Period II. The Norman-French Period 
A.D. 1066 to about 1350 . 

III. Period III. The End of the Middle Ages 

About 1350 to about 1500 

IV. The Medieval Drama . . 

V. Period IV. The Sixteenth Century. The 
Renaissance and the Reign of Eliza 
beth ....... 

VI. The Drama from about 1550 to 1642 . 

VII. Period V. The Seventeenth Century 
1603-1660. Prose and Poetry . 

VIII. Period VI. The Restoration, 1660-1700 

IX. Period VII. The Eighteenth Century 
pseudo- classicism and the beginnings 
of Modern Romanticism . 

X. Period VIII. The Romantic Triumph, 1798 
to About 1830 . 

XL Period IX. The Victorian Period. About 
1830 to 1901 . 

A List of Available Editions 
Study of Important Authors 

Assignments for Study 

Index 



FOR THE 



PRELIMINARY. HOW TO STUDY AND JUDGE 
LITERATURE 

Two Aspects of Literary Study. Such a study of Litera- 
ture as that for which the present book is designed in- 
cludes two purposes, contributing to a common end. In 
the first place (I), the student must gain some general 
knowledge of the conditions out of which English litera- 
ture has come into being, as a whole and during its suc- 
cessive periods, that is of the external facts of one sort 
or another without which it cannot be understood. This 
means chiefly (1) tracing in a general way, from period 
to period, the social life of the nation, and (2) getting some 
acquaintance with the lives of the more important au- 
thors. The principal thing, however (II), is the direct 
study of the literature itself. This study in turn should 
aim first at an understanding of the literature as an ex- 
pression of the authors' views of life and of their personal- 
ities and especially as a portrayal and interpretation of 
the life of their periods and of all life as they have seen 
it; it should aim further at an appreciation of each liter- 
ary work as a product of Fine Art, appealing with peculiar 
power both to our minds and to our emotions, not least 
to the sense of Beauty and the whole higher nature. In 
the present book, it should perhaps be added, the word 
Literature is generally interpreted in the strict sense, as 
including only writing of permanent significance and 
beauty. 

The outline discussion of literary qualities which fol- 
lows is intended to help in the formation of intelligent 
and appreciative judgments. 

Substance and Form. The most thoroughgoing of all 
distinctions in literature, as in the other Fine Arts, is that 
between (1) Substance, the essential content and meaning 
of the work, and (2) Form, the manner in which it is ex- 
pressed (including narrative structure, external style, in 

11 



12 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

poetry verse-form, and many related matters). This dis- 
tinction should be kept in mind, but in what follows it will 
not be to our purpose to emphasize it. 

General Matters. 1. First and always in considering 
any piece of literature a student should ask himself the 
question already implied : Does it present a true protrayal 
of life — of the permanent elements in all life and in human 
nature, of the life or thought of its own particular period, 
and (in most sorts of books) of the persons, real or imag- 
inary, with whom it deals? If it properly accomplishes 
this main purpose, when the reader finishes it he should 
feel that his understanding of life and of people has 
been increased and broadened. But it should always be 
remembered that truth is quite as much a matter of gen- 
eral spirit and impression as of literal accuracy in details 
of fact. The essential question is not, Is the presentation 
of life and character perfect in a photographic fashion? 
but Does it convey the underlying realities? 2. Other 
things being equal, the value of a book, and especially of 
an author's whole work, is proportional to its range, 
that is to the breadth and variety of the life and char- 
acters which it presents. 3. A student should not form 
his judgments merely from what is technically called the 
dogmatic point of view, but should try rather to adopt 
that of historical criticism. This means that he should 
take into account the limitations imposed on every author 
by the age in which he lived. If you find that the poets 
of the Anglo-Saxon 'Beowulf have given a clear and in- 
teresting picture of the life of our barbarous ancestors 
of the sixth or seventh century A. D., you should not 
blame them for a lack of the finer elements of feeling and 
expression which after a thousand years of civilization 
distinguish such delicate spirits as Keats and Tennyson. 
4. It is often important to consider also whether the 
author's personal method is objective, which means that 
he presents life and character without bias; or subjective, 
coloring his work with his personal tastes, feelings and 
impressions. Subjectivity may be a falsifying influence, 
but it may also be an important virtue, adding intimacy, 
charm, or force. 5. Further, one may ask whether the 
author has a deliberately formed theory of life; and if 
so how it shows itself, and, of course, how sound it is. 



HOW TO STUDY AND JUDGE LITERATURE 13 

Intellect, Emotion, Imagination, and Related Qualities. 

Another main question in judging any book concerns the 
union which it shows: (1) of the Intellectual faculty, 
that which enables the author to understand and control 
his material and present it with directness and clearness ; 
and (2) of the Emotion, which gives warmth, enthusiasm, 
and appealing human power. The relative proportions of 
these two faculties vary greatly in books of different 
sorts. Exposition (as in most essays) cannot as a rule 
be permeated with so much emotion as narration or, cer- 
tainly, as lyric poetry. In a great book the relation of 
the two faculties will of course properly correspond to 
form and spirit. Largely a matter of Emotion is the 
Personal Sympathy of the author for his characters, while 
Intellect has a large share in Dramatic Sympathy, whereby 
the author enters truly into the situations and feelings 
of any character, whether he personally likes him or not. 
Largely made up of Emotion are: (1) true Sentiment, 
which is fine feeling of any sort, and which should not 
degenerate into Sentimentalism (exaggerated tender feel- 
ing) ; (2) Humor, the instinctive sense for that which is 
amusing; and (3) the sense for Pathos. Pathos differs 
from Tragedy in that Tragedy (whether in a drama or 
elsewhere) is the suffering of persons who are able to 
struggle against it, Pathos the suffering of those persons 
(children, for instance) who are merely helpless victims. 
Wit, the brilliant perception of incongruities, is a matter 
of Intellect and the complement of Humor. 

Imagination and Fancy. Related to Emotion also and 
one of the most necessary elements in the higher forms 
of literature is Imagination, the faculty of making what 
is absent or unreal seem present and real, and revealing 
the hidden or more subtile forces of life. Its main opera- 
tions may be classified under three heads : 1. Pictorial 
and Presentative. It presents to the author's mind, and 
through him to the minds of his readers, all the elements 
of human experience and life (drawing from his actual ex- 
perience or his reading). 2. Selective, Associative, and 
Constructive. From the unorganized material thus 
brought clearly to the author's consciousness Imagination 
next selects the details which can be turned to present 
use, and proceeds to combine them, uniting scattered traits 



14 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and incidents, perhaps from widely different sources, into 
new characters, stories, scenes, and ideas. The char- 
acters of ' Silas Marner, ' for example, never had an actual 
existence, and the precise incidents of the story never 
took place in just that order and fashion, but they were 
all constructed by the author 's imagination out of what she 
had observed of many real persons and events, and so 
make, in the most significant sense, a true picture of life. 
3. Penetrative and Interpretative. In its subtlest opera- 
tions, further, Imagination penetrates below the surface 
and comprehends and brings to light the deeper forces 
and facts — the real controlling instincts of characters, the 
real motives for actions, and the relations of material 
things to those of the spiritual world and of Man to 
Nature and God. 

Fancy may for convenience be considered as a distinct 
faculty, though it is really the lighter, partly superficial, 
aspect of Imagination. It deals with things not essen- 
tially or significantly true, amusing us with striking or 
pleasing suggestions, such as seeing faces in the clouds, 
which vanish almost as soon as they are discerned. Both 
Imagination and Fancy naturally express themselves, 
often and effectively, through the use of metaphors, sim- 
iles, and suggestive condensed language. In painful con- 
trast to them stands commonplaceness, always a fatal 
fault. 

Idealism, Romance, and Realism. Among the most im- 
portant literary qualities also are Idealism, Romance, and 
Realism. Realism, in the broad sense, means simply the 
presentation of the actual, depicting life as one sees it, 
objectively, without such selection as aims deliberately to 
emphasize some particular aspects, such as the pleasant 
or attractive ones. (Of course all literature is necessarily 
based on the ordinary facts of life, which we may call by 
the more general name of Reality.) Carried to the ex- 
treme, Realism may become ignoble, dealing too frankly 
or in unworthy spirit with the baser side of reality, and 
in almost all ages this sort of Realism has actually at- 
tempted to assert itself in literature. Idealism, the ten- 
dency opposite to Realism, seeks to emphasize the spiritual 
and other higher elements, often to bring out the spiritual 
values which lie beneath the surface. It is an optimistic 



HOW TO STUDY AND JUDGE LITERATURE 15 

interpretation of life, looking for what is good and per- 
manent beneath all the surface confusion. Romance may 
be called Idealism in the realm of the sentiment. It aims 
largely to interest and delight, to throw over life a pleas- 
ing glamor; it generally deals with love or heroic adven- 
ture; and it generally locates its scenes and characters in 
distant times and places, where it can work unhampered 
by our consciousness of the humdrum actualities of our 
daily experience. It may always be asked whether a 
writer of Romance makes his world seem convincingly 
real as we read or whether he frankly abandons all plausi- 
bility. The presence or absence of a supernatural element 
generally makes an important difference. Entitled to 
special mention, also, is spiritual Romance, where atten- 
tion is centered not on external events, which may here 
be treated in somewhat shadowy fashion, but on the 
deeper questions of life. Spiritual Romance, therefore, is 
essentially idealistic. 

Dramatic Power. Dramatic power, in general, means 
the presentation of life with the vivid active reality of 
life and character which especially distinguishes the acted 
drama. It is, of course, one of the main things to be de- 
sired in most narrative; though sometimes the effect 
sought may be something different, as, for instance, in 
romance and poetry, an atmosphere of dreamy beauty. In 
a drama, and to some extent in other forms of narrative, 
dramatic power culminates in the ability to bring out 
the great crises with supreme effectiveness. 

Characters. There is, generally speaking, no greater 
test of an author's skill than his knowledge and presenta- 
tion of characters. "We should consider whether he makes 
them (1) merely caricatures, or (2) type characters, stand- 
ing for certain general traits of human nature but not 
convincingly real or especially significant persons, or (3) 
genuine individuals with all the inconsistencies and half- 
revealed tendencies that in actual life belong to real 
personality. Of course in the case of important char- 
acters, the greater the genuine individuality the greater 
the success. But with secondary characters the principles 
of emphasis and proportion generally forbid very distinct 
individualization; and sometimes, especially in comedy 
(drama), truth of character is properly sacrificed to other 



16 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

objects, such as the main effect. It may also be asked 
whether the characters are simple, as some people are 
in actual life, or complex, like most interesting persons; 
whether they develop, as all real people must under the 
action of significant experience, or whether the author 
merely presents them in brief situations or lacks the power 
to make them anything but stationary. If there are 
several of them it is a further question whether the author 
properly contrasts them in such a way as to secure interest. 
And a main requisite is that he shall properly motivate 
their actions, that is make their actions result naturally 
from their characters, either their controlling traits or 
their temporary impulses. 

Structure. In any work of literature there should be 
definite structure. This requires, (1) Unity, (2) Variety, 
(3) Order, (4) Proportion, and (5) due Emphasis of 
parts. Unity means that everything included in the work 
ought to contribute directly or indirectly to the main 
effect. Very often a definite theme may be found about 
which the whole work centers, as for instance in 'Mac- 
beth, ' The Ruin of a Man through Yielding to Evil. Some- 
times, however, as in a lyric poem, the effect intended 
may be the rendering or creation of a mood, such as that 
of happy content, and in that case the poem may not have 
an easily expressible concrete theme. 

Order implies a proper beginning, arrangement, prog- 
ress, and a definite ending. In narrative, including all 
stories whether in prose or verse and also the drama, 
there should be traceable a Line of Action, comprising 
generally: (1) an Introduction, stating the necessary 
preliminaries; (2) the Initial Impulse, the event which 
really sets in motion this particular story; (3) a Rising 
Action; (4) a Main Climax. Sometimes (generally, in 
Comedy) the Main Climax is identical with the Outcome ; 
sometimes (regularly in Tragedy) the Main Climax is a 
turning point and comes near the middle of the story. 
In that case it really marks the beginning of the success 
of the side which is to be victorious at the end (in Tragedy 
the side opposed to the hero) and it initiates (5) a Falling 
Action, corresponding to the Rising Action, and some- 
times of much the same length, wherein the losing side 
struggles to maintain itself. After (6) the Outcome, 



HOW TO STUDY AND JUDGE LITERATURE 17 

may come (7) a brief tranquilizing Conclusion. The 
Antecedent Action is that part of the characters' experi- 
ences which precedes the events of the story. If it has 
a bearing, information about it must be given either in 
the Introduction or incidentally later on. Sometimes, how- 
ever, the structure just indicated may not be followed ; a 
story may begin in the middle, and the earlier part may 
be told later on in retrospect, or incidentally indicated, 
like the Antecedent Action. 

If in any narrative there is one or more Secondary 
Action, a story which might be separated from the Main 
Action and viewed as complete in itself, criticism should 
always ask whether the Main and Secondary Actions 
are properly unified. In the strictest theory there should 
be an essential connection between them; for instance, 
they may illustrate different and perhaps contrasting 
aspects of the general theme. Often, however, an author 
introduces a Secondary Action merely for the sake of va- 
riety or to increase the breadth of his picture — in order to 
present a whole section of society instead of one narrow 
stratum or group. In such cases he must generally be 
judged to have succeeded if he has established an ap- 
parent unity, say by mingling the same characters in the 
two actions, so that readers are not readily conscious of 
the lack of real structural unity. 

Other things to be considered in narrative are : Move- 
ment, which, unless for special reasons, should be rapid, 
at least not slow and broken ; Suspense ; general Interest ; 
and the questions whether or not there are good situa- 
tions and good minor climaxes, contributing to the inter- 
est; and whether or not motivation is good, apart from 
that which results from character, that is whether events 
are properly represented as happening in accordance with 
the law of cause and effect which inexorably governs 
actual life. But it must always be remembered that in 
such writing as Comedy and Romance the strict rules of 
motivation must be relaxed, and indeed in all literature, 
even in Tragedy, the idealization, condensation, and 
heightening which are the proper methods of Art require 
them to be slightly modified. 

Descriptive Power. Usually secondary in appearance 
but of vital artistic importance, is the author's power of 



18 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

description, of picturing both the appearance of his char- 
acters and the scenes which make his background and 
help to give the tone of his work. Perhaps four subjects 
of description may be distinguished: 1. External Na- 
ture. Here such questions as the following are of vary- 
ing importance, according to the character and purpose of 
the work: Does the author know and care for Nature 
and frequently introduce descriptions? Are the descrip- 
tions concrete and accurate, or on the other hand pur- 
posely general (impressionistic) or carelessly superficial? 
Do they give fine variations of appearance and impres- 
sion, such as delicate shiftings of light and shade and 
delicate tones of color? Are they powerfully sensuous, 
that is do they appeal strongly to the physical senses, 
of sight (color, light, and movement), sound (including 
music), smell, taste, touch, and general physical sensa- 
tion? How great is their variety? Do they deal with 
many parts of Nature, for example the sea, mountains, 
plains, forests, and clouds? Is the love of external beauty 
a passion with the author ? What is the author 's attitude 
toward Nature — (1) does he view Nature in a purely ob- 
jective way, as a mass of material things, a series of ma- 
terial phenomena or a mere embodiment of sensuous 
beauty; or (2) is there symbolism or mysticism in his 
attitude, that is — does he view Nature with awe as a spir- 
itual power; or (3) is he thoroughly subjective, reading 
his own moods into Nature or using Nature chiefly for 
the expression of his moods? Or again, does the author 
describe with merely expository purpose, to make the 
background of his work clear ? 2. Individual Persons and 
Human Life : Is the author skilful in descriptions of 
personal appearance and dress? Does he produce his im- 
pressions by full enumeration of details, or by emphasis on 
prominent or characteristic details? How often and how 
fully does he describe scenes of human activity (such as 
a street scene, a social gathering, a procession on the 
march) ? 3. How frequent and how vivid are his descrip- 
tions of the inanimate background of human life — build- 
ings, interiors of rooms, and the rest? 4. Does the author 
skilfully use description to create the general atmosphere 
in which he wishes to invest his work — an atmosphere of 
cheerfulness, of mystery, of activity, or any of a hundred 



HOW TO STUDY AND JUDGE LITERATURE 19 

other moods? 

Style. Style in general means ' manner of writing. ' In 
the broad sense it includes everything pertaining to the 
author's spirit and point of view — almost everything 
which is here being discussed. More narrowly considered, 
as 'external style,' it designates the author's use of lan- 
guage. Questions to be asked in regard to external style 
are such as these : Is it good or bad, careful or careless, 
clear and easy or confused and difficult; simple or com- 
plex; terse and forceful (perhaps colloquial) or involved 
and stately; eloquent, balanced, rhythmical; vigorous, or 
musical, languid, delicate and decorative ; varied or mo- 
notonous ; plain or figurative ; poor or rich in connotation 
and poetic suggestiveness ; beautiful, or only clear and 
strong? Are the sentences mostly long or short; periodic 
or loose; mostly of one type, such as the declarative, or 
with frequent introduction of such other forms as the 
question and the exclamation? 

Poetry. Most of what has thus far been said applies 
to both Prose and Poetry. But in Poetry, as the litera- 
ture especially characterized in general by high Emotion, 
Imagination, and Beauty, finer and more delicate effects 
are to be sought than in Prose. Poetry, generally speak- 
ing, is the expression of the deeper nature ; it belongs pe- 
culiarly to the realm of the spirit. On the side of poetical 
expression such imaginative figures of speech as meta- 
phors and similes, and such devices as alliteration, prove 
especially helpful. It may be asked further of poetry, 
whether the meter and stanza structure are appropriate 
to the mood and thought and so handled as to bring out 
the emotion effectively ; and whether the sound is adapted 
to the sense (for example, musical where the idea is of 
peace or quiet beauty). If the sound of the words actually 
imitates the sound of the thing indicated, the effect is 
called Onomatopoeia. Among kinds of poetry, according 
to form, the most important are: (1) Narrative, which 
includes many subordinate forms, such as the Epic. (2) 
Lyric. Lyric poems are expressions of spontaneous emo- 
tion and are necessarily short. (3) Dramatic, including 
not merely the drama but all poetry of vigorous action. 
(4) Descriptive, like Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village' and 
Tennyson's 'Dream of Fair Women.' Minor kinds are: 



20 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

(5) Satiric; and (6) Didactic. 

Highly important in poetry is Rhythm, but the word 
means merely 'flow,' so that rhythm belongs to prose as 
well as to poetry. Good rhythm is merely a pleasing 
succession of sounds. Meter, the distinguishing formal 
mark of poetry and all verse, is merely rhythm which is 
regular in certain fundamental respects, roughly speaking 
is rhythm in which the recurrence of stressed syllables or 
of feet with definite time-values is regular. There is no 
proper connection either in spelling or in meaning be- 
tween rhythm and rime (which is generally misspelled 
'rhyme'). The adjective derived from 'rhythm' is 
'rhythmical'; there is no adjective from 'rime' except 
'rimed.' The word 'verse' in its general sense includes 
all writing in meter. Poetry is that verse which has real 
literary merit. In a very different and narrower sense 
'verse' means 'line' (never properly 'stanza'). 

Classicism and Romanticism. Two of the most impor- 
tant contrasting tendencies of style in the general sense 
are Classicism and Romanticism. Classicism means those 
qualities which are most characteristic of the best litera- 
ture of Greece and Rome. It is in fact partly identical 
with Idealism. It aims to express the inner truth or cen- 
tral principles of things, without anxiety for minor details, 
and it is by nature largely intellectual in quality, though 
not by any means to the exclusion of emotion. In out- 
ward form, therefore, it insists on correct structure, re- 
straint, careful finish and avoidance of all excess. 'Para- 
dise Lost,' Arnold's 'Sohrab and Rustum,' and Addison's 
essays are modern examples. Romanticism, which in 
general prevails in modern literature, lays most emphasis 
on independence and fulness of expression and on 
strong emotion, and it may be comparatively careless of 
form. The Classical style has well been called sculptur- 
esque, the Romantic picturesque. The virtues of the 
Classical are exquisiteness and incisive significance ; of the 
Romantic, richness and splendor. The dangers of the 
Classical are coldness and formality; of the Romantic, 
over-luxuriance, formlessness and excess of emotion.* 

* All these matters, here merely suggested, are fully discussed in 
the present author's l Principles of Composition and Literature. 7 
(The A. S. Barnes Co.) 



A TABULAE VIEW OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

I. The Britons and the Anglo-Saxon Period, from the begin- 
ning- to the Norman Conquest in 1066 A. D. 

A. The Britons, before and during the Roman occupation, 
to the fifth century. 

B. Anglo-Saxon Poetry, on the Continent in prehistoric 
times before the migration to England, and in England 
especially during the Northumbrian Period, seventh and 
eighth centuries A. D. Ballads, ' Beowulf,' Caedmon, 
Bede (Latin prose), Cynewulf. 

C. Anglo-Saxon Prose, of the West Saxon Period, tenth 
and eleventh centuries, beginning with King Alfred, 
871-901. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 

•II. The Norman-French Period, 1066 to about 1350. 

Literature in Latin, French, and English. Many dif- 
ferent forms, both religious and secular, including the 
religious drama. The Metrical Romances, including the 
Arthurian Cycle. Geoffrey of Monmouth, 'Historia 
Regum Britanniae' (Latin), about 1136. Waee, 'Brut' 
(French), about 1155. Laghamon, 'Brut' (English), 
about 1200. 
J II. The End of the Middle Ages, about 1350 to about 1500. 

The Hundred Years' War. 'Sir John Mandeville 's ' 
'Voyage.' Chaucer, 1338-1400. John Gower. 'The 
Vision Concerning Piers the Plowman.' Wiclif and 
the Lollard Bible, about 1380. Popular Ballads. The 
War of the Roses. Malory's 'Morte Darthur, ' finished 
1467. Caxton and the printing press, 1476. Morality 
Plays and Interludes. 
IV. The Renaissance and the Elizabethan Period, about 1500 
to 1603^ 

Great dTscoveries and activity, both intellectual and 
physical. Influence of Italy. The Reformation. 

Henry VIII, 1509-47. Edward VI, to 1553. Mary, to 1558. 
Elizabeth, 1558-1603. Defeat of the Armada, 1588. 

Sir Thomas More, 'Utopia.' Tyndale's New Testament 
and other translations of the Bible. 

Wyatt and Surrey, about 1540. 

Prose Fiction. Lyly 's. 'Euphues,' 1578. Sidney's 'Ar- 

Spenser," 1552-1599. 'The Shepherd's Calendar,' 1579. 

'The Faerie Queene,' 1590 and later. 
Lyric poetry, including sonnet sequences. John Donne. 
The Drama. Classical and native influences. Lyly, 

Peele, Greene, Marlowe. Shakspere, 1564-1616. Ben 

Jonson and other dramatists. 

21 



22 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



v. 



VI. 



VII. 



The Seventeenth Century, 1603-1660. 

The First Stuart Kings, James I (to 1625) and Charles I. 
Cavaliers and Puritans. The Civil War and the Com- 
monwealth. Cromwell. 

The Drama,- to 1642. 

Francis Bacon. 

The King James Bible, 1611. 

Lyric Poets. Herrick. The ' Metaphysical' religious 
poets — Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan. Cavalier and 
Puritan poets. 

Milton, 1608-1674. 

John Bunyan, ' Pilgrim's Progress.' 1678. 
The Eestoration Period, from the Eestoration of Charles II 
in 1660 to the death of Dryden in 1700. 

Charles II, 1660-1685. James II, 1685 to the Eevolution 
in 1688. William and Mary, 1688-1702. 

Butler's 'Hudibras.' Pepys' ' Diary. ' The Eestoration 



Drama. Dryden, 1631-1700. 



The Eighteenth Century. 
Queen Anne, 1702-1715. 



The four Georges, 1715-1830. 



Pseudo-Classic 
Literature. 

Swift, 1667-1745. 
Addison, 1672-1719. 
Steele, 1672-1729. 
Pope, 1688-1744. 
Johnson, 1709-1784. 

The Later Prose. 

Burke, 1729-1797. 
Gibbon, 'Decline and 

Fall,' 1776-1788. 
Boswell, 'Life of 

Johnson,' 1791. 



The Novel. 

'Sir Eoger de Cov- 
erly,' 1711-12. 

Defoe, 1661-1731. 
' Eobinson Crusoe, ' 
1719-20. 

Eichardson, 1689-1761. 
1 Clarissa Harlowe, ' 
1747-8. 

Fielding, 1707-1754. 

Smollett. 

Sterne. 

Goldsmith, 'Vicar of 

__. Wakefield,' 1766. 

Historical and 'Goth- 
ic' Novels. 

Miss Burney, ' Eve- 
lina,' 1778. 

Eevolutionary Novels 
of Purpose. God- 
win, ' Caleb Wil- 
liams. ' 

Miss Edgeworth. 

Miss Austen. 



The Romantic Revolt 
— Poetry. 

Thomson, ' The Sea- 
sons,' 1726-30. 
Collins, 'Odes,' 1747. 
Gray, 1716-71. 

Percy's ' Eeliques, ' 
1765. 

Goldsmith, 'The De- 
serted Village, ' 
1770. 

Cowper. 

Chatterton. 

Macpherson, Ossianic 
imitations. 

Burns, 1759-96. 

Blake. 

The Drama. 

Pseudo-Classical Trag- 
edy, Addison ' s 
'Cato,' 1713. 

Sentimental Comedy. 

Domestic Tragedy. 

Eevival of genuine 
Comedy of Man- 
ners. Goldsmith, 
' She Stoops to 
Conquer, ' 1773. 
Sheridan. 



TABULAR VIEW OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 23 



VIII. 



IX. 



The Eomantic Triumph, 1798 to about 1830. 

Coleridge, 1772-1834. Wordsworth, 1770-1850. Southey, 
1774-1843. Scott, 1771-1832. 

Byron, 1788-1824. Shelley, 1792-1822. Keats, 1759-1821. 
The Victorian Period, about 1830-1901. 

Victoria Queen, 1837-1901. 



Macaulay, 1800-1859. 
Carlyle, 1795-1881. 
Euskin, 1819-1900. 



Matthew Arnold, 
says, 1861-82. 



Poets. 

Mrs. Browning, 1806- 

1861. 
Tennyson, 1809-1892. 
Browning, 1812-1889. 
Matthew Arnold, 

poems, 1848-58. 
Eossetti, 1828-82. 
Morris, 1834-96. 
Swinburne, 1837-1909. 



Kipling, 1865- 



Novelists. 

Charlotte Bronte, 

1816-1855. 
Dickens, 1812-1870. 
Thackeray, 1811-1863. 
Kingsley, 1819-1875. 
George Eliot, 1819- 

1880. 
Eeade, 1814-1884. 
Trollope, 1815-1882. 
Blackmore, 'Lorna 

Doone,' 1869. 
Shorthouse, 'John In- 

glesant,' 1881. 
Meredith, 1828-1910. 
Thomas Hardy, 1840- 
Stevenson, 1850-1894. 
Kipling, 1865- 



24 A HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



REFERENCE BOOKS 



It is not a part of the plan of this book to present any extended 
bibliography, but there are certain reference books to which the 
student's attention should be called. 'Chambers' Cyclopaedia of 
English Literature,' edition of 1910, published in the United 
States by the J. B. Lippincott Co. in three large volumes at $15.00 
(generally sold at about half that price) is in most parts very 
satisfactory. Garnett and Gosse's ' Illustrated History of English 
Literature, four volumes, published by the Macmillan Co. at 
$20.00 and in somewhat simpler form by Grosset and Dunlap at 
$12.00 (sold for less) is especially valuable for its illustrations. 
Jusserand's 'Literary History of the English People' (to 1642, G. 
F. Putnam's Sons, three volumes, $3.50 a volume) should be men- 
tioned. Courthope's 'History of English Poetry' (Macmillan, six 
volumes, $3.25 a volume, is full and after the first volume good. 
1 The Cambridge History of English Literature, ' now nearing com- 
pletion in fourteen volumes (G. P. Putnam's Sons, $2.50 a volume) 
is the largest and in most parts the most scholarly general work 
in the field, but is generally too technical except for special stu- 
dents. The short biographies of many of the chief English authors 
in the English Men of Letters Series (Macmillan, 30 and 75 cents 
a volume) are generally admirable. For appreciative criticism of 
some of the great poets the essays of Lowell and of Matthew 
Arnold are among the best. Frederick Ryland's 'Chronological 
Outlines of English Literature' (Macmillan, $1.00) is very useful 
for reference though now much in need of revision. It is much to 
be desired that students should have at hand for consultation some 
good short history of England, such as that of S. R. Gardiner 
(Longmans, Green, and Co.) or that of J. R. Green. 



A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 



A HISTORY OF 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 



CHAPTER I 

PERIOD I. THE BRITONS AND THE ANGLO-SAXONS. TO A. D. 

1066. 

Foreword. The two earliest of the nine main divisions 
of English Literature are by far the longest — taken to- 
gether are longer than all the others combined — but we 
shall pass rather rapidly over them. This is partly be- 
cause the amount of thoroughly great literature which 
they produced is small, and partly because for present- 
day readers it is in effect a foreign literature, written in 
early forms of English or in foreign languages, so that to- 
day it is intelligible only through special study or in 
translation. 

The Britons. The present English race has gradually 
shaped itself out of several distinct peoples which suc- 
cessively occupied or conquered the island of Great 
Britain. The earliest one of these peoples which need 
here be mentioned belonged to the Celtic family and was 
itself divided into two branches. The Goidels or Gaels 
were settled in the northern part of the island, which is 
now Scotland, and were the ancestors of the present High- 
land Scots. On English literature they exerted little or 
no influence until a late period. The Britons, from whom 
the present Welsh are descended, inhabited what is now 
England and "Wales; and they were still further sub- 
divided, like most barbarous peoples, into many tribes 
which were often at war with one another. Though the 
Britons were conquered and chiefly supplanted later on 
by the Anglo-Saxons, enough of them, as we shall see, 

27 



28 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

were spared and intermarried with the victors to trans- 
mit something of their racial qualities to the English 
nation and literature. 

The characteristics of the Britons, which are those of 
the Celtic family as a whole, appear in their history and 
in the scanty late remains of their literature. Two main 
traits include or suggest all the others: first, a vigorous 
but fitful emotionalism which rendered them vivacious, 
lovers of novelty, and brave, but ineffective in practical 
affairs; second, a somewhat fantastic but sincere and 
delicate sensitiveness to beauty. Into impetuous action 
they were easily hurried; but their momentary ardor 
easily cooled into fatalistic despondency. To the mys- 
terious charm of Nature — of hills and forests and pleasant 
breezes; to the loveliness and grace of meadow-flowers 
or of a young man or a girl; to the varied sheen of rich 
colors — to all attractive objects of sight and sound and 
motion their fancy responded keenly and joyfully; but 
they preferred chiefly to weave these things into stories 
and verse of supernatural romance or vague suggestive- 
ness; for substantial work of solider structure either in 
life or in literature they possessed comparatively little 
faculty. Here is a description (exceptionally beautiful, to 
be sure) from the story 'Kilhwch and Olwen': 

'The maid was clothed in a robe of flame-colored silk, and about 
her neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious em- 
eralds and rubies. More yellow was her head than the flowers 
of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the 
wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms 
of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. 
The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the three-mewed 
falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy 
than the breast of the white swan, her cheeks were redder than 
the reddest roses. Who beheld her was filled with her love. Four 
white trefoils sprang up wherever she trod. And therefore was she 
called Olwen.' 

This charming fancifulness and delicacy of feeling is 
apparently the great contribution of the Britons to Eng- 
lish literature ; from it may perhaps be descended the 
fairy scenes of Shakspere and possibly to some extent the 
lyrical music of Tennyson. 

The Roman Occupation. Of the Roman conquest and 
occupation of Britain (England and Wales) we need only 



THE BRITONS AND ANGLO-SAXONS 29 

make brief mention, since it produced virtually no effect 
on English literature. The fact should not be forgotten 
that for over three hundred years, from the first century 
A. D. to the beginning of the fifth, the island was a 
Roman province, with Latin as the language of the ruling 
class of Roman immigrants, who introduced Roman civi- 
lization and later on Christianity, to the Britons of the 
towns and plains. But the interest of the Romans in the 
island was centered on other things than writing, and 
the great bulk of the Britons themselves seem to have been 
only superficially affected by the Roman supremacy. At 
the end of the Roman rule, as at its beginning, they appear 
divided into mutually jealous tribes, still largely barbar- 
ous and primitive. 

The Anglo-Saxons. Meanwhile across the North Sea 
the three Germanic tribes which were destined to form 
the main element in the English race were multiplying and 
unconsciously preparing to swarm to their new home. The 
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes occupied territories in the 
region which includes parts of the present Holland, of 
Germany about the mouth of the Elbe, and of Denmark. 
They were barbarians, living partly from piratical ex- 
peditions against the northern and eastern coasts of Eu- 
rope, partly from their flocks and herds, and partly from 
a rude sort of agriculture. At home they seem to have 
sheltered themselves chiefly in unsubstantial wooden vil- 
lages, easily destroyed and easily abandoned. For the 
able-bodied freemen among them the chief occupation, 
as a matter of course, was war. Strength, courage, and 
loyalty to king and comrades were the chief virtues that 
they admired; ferocity and cruelty, especially to other 
peoples, were necessarily among their prominent traits 
when their blood was up ; though among themselves there 
was no doubt plenty of rough and ready companionable 
good-humor. Their bleak country, where the foggy and 
unhealthy marshes of the coast gave way further inland 
to vast and somber forests, developed in them during 
their long inactive winters a sluggish and gloomy mood, 
in which, however, the alternating spirit of aggressive 
enterprise was never quenched. In religion they had 
reached a moderately advanced state of heathenism, wor- 
shipping especially, it seems, Woden, a 'furious' god as 



30 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

well as a wise and crafty one; the warrior Tiu; and the 
strong-armed Thunor (the Scandinavian Thor);'but to- 
gether with these some milder deities like the goddess 
of spring, Eostre, from whom our Easter is named. For 
the people on whom they fell these barbarians were a 
pitiless and terrible scourge; yet they possessed in un- 
developed form the intelligence, the energy, the strength 
— most of the qualities of head and heart and body — which 
were to make of them one of the great world-races. 

The Anglo-Saxon Conquest and Settlement. The proc- 
ess by which Britain became England was a part of 
the long agony which transformed the Roman Empire into 
modern Europe. In the fourth century A. D. the Angles, 
Saxons, and Jutes began to harry the southern and east- 
ern shores of Britain, where the Romans were obliged to 
maintain a special military establishment against them. 
But early in the fifth century the Romans, hard-pressed 
even in Italy by other barbarian invaders, withdrew all 
their troops and completely abandoned Britain. Not long 
thereafter, and probably before the traditional date of 
449, the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons began to come in large 
bands with the deliberate purpose of permanent settle- 
ment. Their conquest, very different in its methods and 
results from that of the Romans, may roughly be said 
to have occupied a hundred and fifty or two hundred 
years. The earlier invading hordes fixed themselves at 
various points on the eastern and southern shore and 
gradually fought their way inland, and they were con- 
stantly augmented by new arrivals. In general the Angles 
settled in the east and north and the Saxons in the south, 
while the less numerous Jutes, the first to come, in Kent, 
soon ceased to count in the movement. In this way there 
naturally came into existence a group of separate and 
rival kingdoms, which when they were not busy with 
the Britons were often at war with each other. Their 
number varied somewhat from time to time as they were 
united or divided; but on the whole, seven figured most 
prominently, whence comes the traditional name 'The 
Saxon Heptarchy' (Seven Kingdoms). The resistance of 
the Britons to the Anglo-Saxon advance was often brave 
and sometimes temporarily successful. Early in the sixth 
century, for example, they won at Mount Badon in the 



THE BRITONS AND ANGLO-SAXONS 31 

south a great victory, later connected in tradition with 
the legendary name of King Arthur, which for many 
years gave them security from further aggressions. But 
in the long run their racial defects proved fatal; they 
were unable to combine in permanent and steady union, 
and tribe by tribe the newcomers drove them slowly 
back ; until early in the seventh century the Anglo-Saxons 
were in possession of nearly all of what is now England, 
the exceptions being the regions all along the west coast, 
including what has ever since been known as Wales. 

Of the Roman and British civilization the Anglo-Saxons 
were ruthless destroyers, exulting, like other barbarians, 
in the wanton annihilation of things which they did not 
understand. Every city, or nearly every one, which they 
took, they burned, slaughtering the inhabitants. They 
themselves occupied the land chiefly as masters of scat- 
tered farms, each warrior established in a large rude house 
surrounded by its various outbuildings and the huts of 
the British slaves and the Saxon and British bondmen. 
Just how largely the Britons were exterminated and 
how largely they were kept alive as slaves and wives, is 
uncertain; but it is evident that at least a considerable 
number were spared; to this the British names of many 
of our objects of humble use, for example mattoc and 
basket, testify. 

In the natural course of events, however, no sooner had 
the Anglo-Saxons destroyed the (imperfect and partial) 
civilization of their predecessors than they began to re- 
build one for themselves ; possessors of a fertile land, they 
settled down to develop it, and from tribes of lawless 
fighters were before long transformed into a race of 
farmer-citizens. Gradually trade with the Continent, also, 
was reestablished and grew; but perhaps the most im- 
portant humanizing influence was the reintroduction of 
Christianity. The story is famous of how Pope Gregory 
the Great, struck by the beauty of certain Angle slave- 
boys at Rome, declared that they ought to be called not 
Angli but Angeli (angels) and forthwith, in 597, sent to 
Britain St. Augustine (not the famous African saint of 
that name), who landed in Kent and converted that king- 
dom. Within the next two generations, and after much 
fierce fighting between the adherents of the two religions, 



32 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

all the other kingdoms as well had been christianized. It 
was only the southern half of the island, however, that 
was won by the Roman missionaries; in the north the 
work was done independently by preachers from Ireland, 
where, in spite of much anarchy, a certain degree of civi- 
lization had been preserved. These two types of Chris- 
tianity, those of Ireland and of Rome, were largely dif- 
ferent in spirit. The Irish missionaries were simple and 
loving men and won converts by the beauty of their 
lives; the Romans brought with them the architecture, 
music, and learning of their imperial city and the ag- 
gressive energy which in the following centuries was to 
make their Church supreme throughout the Western 
world. When the inevitable clash for supremacy came, 
the king of the then-dominant Anglian kingdom, North- 
umbria, made choice of the Roman as against the Irish 
Church, a choice which proved decisive for the entire 
island. And though our personal sympathies may well go 
to the finer-spirited Irish, this outcome was on the whole 
fortunate; for only through religious union with Rome 
during the slow centuries of medieval rebirth could Eng- 
land be bound to the rest of Europe as one of the family 
of cooperating Christian states; and outside that family 
she would have been isolated and spiritually starved. 

One of the greatest gifts of Christianity, it should be 
observed, and one of the most important influences in 
medieval civilization, was the network of monasteries 
which were now gradually established and became centers 
of active hospitality and the chief homes of such learning 
as was possible to the time. 

Anglo-Saxon Poetry. The Early Pagan Poetry and 
'Beowulf.' The Anglo-Saxons doubtless brought with them 
from the Continent the rude beginnings of poetry, such 
as come first in the literature of every people and con- 
sist largely of brief magical charms and of rough 'popular 
ballads' (ballads of the people). The charms explain 
themselves as an inevitable product of primitive supersti- 
tion; the ballads probably first sprang up and developed, 
among all races, in much the following way. At the very 
beginning of human society, long before the commence- 
ment of history, the primitive groups of savages who then 
constituted mankind were instinctively led to express 



THE BRITONS AND ANGLO-SAXONS 33 

their emotions together, communally, in rhythmical fashion. 
Perhaps after an achievement in hunting or war the vil- 
lage-group would mechanically fall into a dance, some- 
times, it might be, about their village fire. Suddenly from 
among the inarticulate cries of the crowd some one ex- 
cited individual would shout out a fairly distinct 
rhythmical expression. This expression, which may be 
called a line, was taken up and repeated by the crowd; 
others might be added to it, and thus gradually, in the 
course of generations, arose the regular habit of com- 
munal composition, composition of something like com- 
plete ballads by the throng as a whole. This procedure 
ceased to be important everywhere long before the liter- 
ary period, but it led to the frequent composition by 
humble versifiers of more deliberate poems which were 
still 'popular' because they circulated by word of mouth, 
only, from generation to generation, among the common 
people, and formed one of the best expressions of their 
feeling, y At an early period also professional minstrels, 
called by the Anglo-Saxons scops or gleemen, disengaged 
themselves from the crowd and began to gain their living 
by wandering from village to village or tribe to tribe chant- 
ing to the harp either the popular ballads or more formal 
poetry of their own composition. Among all races when 
a certain stage of social development is reached at least 
one such minstrel is to be found as a regular retainer at 
the court of every barbarous chief or king, ready to enter- 
tain the warriors at their feasts with chants of heroes and 
battles and of the exploits of their present lord. All the 
earliest products of these processes of 'popular' and min- 
strel composition are everywhere lost long before recorded 
literature begins, but the processes themselves in their less 
formal stages continue among uneducated people (whose 
mental life always remains more or less primitive) even 
down to the present time. 

Out of the popular ballads, or, chiefly, of the minstrel 
poetry which is partly based on them, regularly de- 
velops epic poetry. Perhaps a minstrel finds a number 
of ballads which deal with the exploits of a single hero 
or with a single event. He combines them as best he can 
into a unified story and recites this on important and 
stately occasions. As his work passes into general circu- 



34 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

lation other minstrels add other ballads, until at last, very 
likely after many generations, a complete epic is formed, 
outwardly continuous and whole, but generally more or 
less clearly separable on analysis into its original parts. 
Or, on the other hand, the combination may be mostly 
performed all at once at a comparatively late period by 
a single great poet, who with conscious art weaves to- 
gether a great mass of separate materials unto the nearly 
finished epic. 

Not much Anglo-Saxon poetry of the pagan period has 
come down to us. By far the most important remaining 
example is the epic 'Beowulf,' of about three thousand 
lines. This poem seems to have originated on the Con- 
tinent, but when and where are not now to be known. 
It may have been carried to England in the form of ballads 
by the Anglo-Saxons; or it may be Scandinavian ma- 
terial, later brought in by Danish or Norwegian pirates. 
At any rate it seems to have taken on its present form in 
England during the seventh and eighth centuries. It re- 
lates, with the usual terse and unadorned power of really 
primitive poetry, Ltipw the hero Beowulf, coming over the 
sea to the relief of King Hrothgar, delivers him from 
a monster, Grendel, and then from the vengeance of 
Grendel's only less formidable mother. Returned home 
in triumph, Beowulf much later receives the due reward 
of his valor by being made king of his own tribe, and 
meets his death while killing a fire-breathing dragon 
which has become a scourge to his people. As he appears 
in the poem, Beowulf is an idealized Anglo-Saxon hero, 
but in origin he may have been any one of several other 
different things. Perhaps he was the old Germanic god 
Beowa, and his exploits originally allegories, like some of 
those in the Greek mythology, of his services to man; 
he may, for instance, first have been the sun, driving 
away the mists and cold of winter and of the swamps, 
hostile forces personified in Grendel and his mother. Or, 
Beowulf may really have been a great human fighter who 
actually killed some especially formidable wild beasts, 
and whose superhuman strength in the poem results, 
through the similarity of names, from his being confused 
with Beowa. This is the more likely because there is in 
the poem a slight trace of authentic history. (See below, 



THE BRITONS AND ANGLO-SAXONS 35 

under the assignments for study.) 
^Beowulf presents an interesting though very incom- 
plete picture of the life of the upper, warrior, caste among 
the northern Germanic tribes during their later period of 
barbarism on the Continent and in England, a life more 
highly developed than that of the Anglo-Saxons before 
their conquest of the island. About King Hrothgar are 
grouped his immediate retainers, the warriors, with whom 
he shares his wealth; it is a part of the character of a 
good king to be generous in the distribution of gifts of 
gold and weapons. Somewhere in the background there 
must be a village, where the bondmen and slaves provide 
the daily necessaries of life and where some of the war- 
riors may have houses and families; but all this is be- 
neath the notice of the courtly poet. The center of the 
warriors' life is the great hall of the king, built chiefly 
of timber. Inside, there are benches and tables for feast- 
ing, and the walls are perhaps adorned with tapestries. 
Near the center is the hearth, whence the smoke must 
escape, if it escapes at all, through a hole in the roof. In 
the hall the warriors banquet, sometimes in the company 
of their wives, but the women retire before the later 
revelry which often leaves the men drunk on the floor. 
Sometimes, it seems, there are sleeping-rooms or niches 
about the sides of the hall, but in 'Beowulf Hrothgar and 
his followers retire to other quarters. War, feasting, 
and hunting are the only occupations in which the war- 
riors care to be thought to take an interest. 

The spirit of the poem is somber and grim. There is 
no unqualified happiness of mood, and only brief hints 
of delight in the beauty and joy of the world. Rather, 
there is stern satisfaction in the performance of the war- 
rior's and the sea-king's task, the determination of a 
strong-willed race to assert itself and do, with much bar- 
barian boasting, what its hand finds to do in the midst 
of a difficult life and a hostile nature. For the ultimate 
force in the universe of these fighters and their poets (in 
spite of certain Christian touches inserted by later poetic 
editors before the poem crystallized into its present form) 
is Wyrd, the Fate of the Germanic peoples, cold as their 
own winters and the bleak northern sea, irresistible, des- 
potic, and unmoved by sympathy for man.i Great as the 



36 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

differences are, very much of this Anglo-Saxon pagan 
spirit persists centuries later in the English Puritans. 

For the finer artistic graces, also, and the structural sub- 
tilties of a more developed literary period, we must not, 
of course, look in 'Beowulf.' The narrative is often more 
dramatic than clear, and there is no thought of any mi- 
nuteness of characterization. A few typical characters 
stand out clearly, and they were all that the poet's tur- 
bulent and not very attentive audience could understand. 
But the barbaric vividness and power of the poem give 
it much more than a merely historical interest; and the 
careful reader cannot fail to realize that it is after all 
the product of a long period of poetic development. 

The Anglo-Saxon Verse-Form. The poetic form of ' Beo- 
wulf is that of virtually all Anglo-Saxon poetry down 
to the tenth century, or indeed to the end, a form which 
is roughly represented in the present book in a pas- 
sage of imitative translation two pages below. The 
verse is unrimed, not arranged in stanzas, and with lines 
more commonly end-stopped (with distinct pauses at the 
ends) than is true in good modern poetry. Each line 
is divided into halves and each half contains two stressed 
syllables, generally long in quantity. The number of un- 
stressed syllables appears to a modern eye or ear ir- 
regular and actually is very unequal, but they are really 
combined with the stressed ones into 'feet' in accordance 
with certain definite principles. At least one of the 
stressed syllables in each half -line must be in alliteration 
with one in the other half -line ; and most often the alliter- 
ation includes both stressed syllables in the first half- 
line and the first stressed syllable in the second, occa- 
sionally all four stressed syllables. (All vowels are held 
to alliterate with each other.) It will be seen therefore 
that (1) emphatic stress and (2) alliteration are the basal 
principles of the system. To a present-day reader the 
verse sounds crude, the more so because of the harshly 
consonantal character of the Anglo-Saxon language ; and 
in comparison with modern poetry it is undoubtedly un- 
melodious. But it was worked out on conscious artistic 
principles, carefully followed ; and when chanted, as it was 
meant to be, to the harp it possessed much power and even 
beauty of a vigorous sort, to which the pictorial and 



THE BRITONS AND ANGLO-SAXONS 37 

metaphorical wealth of the Anglo-Saxon poetic vocabu- 
lary largely contributed. 

This last-named quality, the use of metaphors, is per- 
haps the most conspicuous one in the style of the Anglo- 
Saxon poetry. The language, compared to that of our own 
vastly more complex time, was undeveloped; but for use 
in poetry, especially, there were a great number of peri- 
phrastic but vividly picturesque metaphorical synonyms 
(technically called kennings). Thus the spear becomes 
'the slaughter-shaft'; fighting 'hand-play'; the sword 
'the leavings of the hammer' (or 'of the anvil') ; and a 
ship 'the foamy-necked floater.' These kennings add 
much imaginative suggestiveness to the otherwise over- 
terse style, and often contribute to the grim irony which 
is another outstanding trait. 

Anglo-Saxon Poetry. The Northumbrian Period. The 
Anglo-Saxons were for a long time fully occupied with the 
work of conquest and settlement, and their first literature 
of any importance, aside from 'Beowulf,' appears at about 
the time when 'Beowulf was being put into its present 
form, namely in the seventh century. This was in the 
Northern, Anglian, kingdom of Northumbria (Yorkshire 
and Southern Scotland), which, as we have already said, 
had then won the political supremacy, and whose monas- 
teries and capital city, York, thanks to the Irish mis- 
sionaries, had become the chief centers of learning and 
culture in Western Christian Europe. Still pagan in 
spirit are certain obscure but ingenious and skillfully 
developed riddles in verse, representatives of one form of 
popular literature only less early than the ballads and 
charms. [There remain also a few pagan lyric poems, 
which are all not only somber like 'Beowulf but dis- 
tinctly elegiac, that is pensively melancholy. They deal 
with the hard and tragic things in life, the terrible power 
of ocean and storm, or the inexorableness and dreariness of 
death, banishment, and the separation of friends. In their 
frequent tender notes of pathos there may be some in- 
fluence from the Celtic spirit. The greater part of the 
literature of the period, however, was Christian, produced 
in the monasteries or under their influence. The first 
Christian writer was Caedmon (pronounced Kadmon), 
who toward the end of the seventh century paraphrased 



38 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in Anglo-Saxon verse some portions of the Bible. The 
legend of his divine call is famous.* The following is 
a modern rendering of the hymn which is said to have 
been his first work: 

Now must we worship the heaven-realm's "Warder, 

The Maker's might and his mind's thought, 

The glory-father's work as he every wonder, 

Lord everlasting, of old established. 

He first fashioned the firmament for mortals, 

Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator. 

Then the midearth mankind's Warder, 

Lord everlasting, afterwards wrought, 

For men a garden, God almighty. 

After Caedmon comes Bede, not a poet but a monk 
of strong and beautiful character, a profound scholar 
who in nearly forty Latin prose works summarized most 
of the knowledge of his time. The other name to be re- 
membered is that of Cynewulf (pronounced Kinnywulf), 
the author of some noble religious poetry (in Anglo- 
Saxon), especially narratives dealing with Christ and 
Christian Apostles and heroes. There is still other Anglo- 
Saxon Christian poetry, generally akin in subjects to 
Cynewulf 's, but in most of the poetry of the whole period 
the excellence results chiefly from the survival of the 
old pagan spirit which distinguishes 'Beowulf '. "~Where the 
poet writes for edification he is likely to be dull, but 
when his story provides him with sea-voyages, with bat- 
tles, chances for dramatic dialogue, or any incidents of 
vigorous action or of passion, the zest for adventure and 
war rekindles, and we have descriptions and narratives of 
picturesque color and stern force. Sometimes there is 
real religious yearning, and indeed the heroes of these 
poems are partly medieval hermits and ascetics as well 
as quick-striking fighters; but for the most part the 
Christian Providence is really only the heathen Wyrd 
under another name, and God and Christ are viewed in 
much the same way as the Anglo-Saxon kings, the objects 
of feudal allegiance which is sincere but rather self- 

* It may be found in Garnett and Gosse, I, 19-20. 



THE BEITONS AND ANGLO-SAXONS 39 

assertive and worldly than humble or consecrated. 

On the whole, then, Anglo-Saxon poetry exhibits the 
limitations of a culturally early age, but it manifests also 
a degree of power which gives to Anglo-Saxon literature 
unquestionable superiority over that of any other Euro- 
pean country of the same period. 

The West-Saxon, Prose, Period. The horrors which the 
Anglo-Saxons had inflicted on the Britons they themselves 
were now to suffer from their still heathen and piratical 
kinsmen the 'Danes' or Northmen, inhabitants of the 
Scandinavian peninsula and the neighboring coasts. For 
a hundred years, throughout the ninth century, the Danes, 
appearing with unwearied persistence, repeatedly ravaged 
and plundered England, and they finally made complete 
conquest of Northumbria, destroyed all the churches and 
monasteries, and almost completely extinguished learn- 
ing, ""ft is a familiar story how Alfred, king from 871 to 
901 of the southern kingdom of Wessex (the land of the 
West Saxons), which had now taken first place among 
the Anglo-Saxon states, stemmed the tide of invasion and 
by ceding to the 'Danes' the whole northeastern half of 
the island obtained for the remainder the peace which 
was the first essential for the reestablishment of civiliza- 
tion. Peace secured, Alfred, who was one of the greatest 
of all English kings, labored unremittingly for learning, 
as for everything else that was useful, and he himself 
translated from Latin into Anglo-Saxjm half a dozen of 
the best informational manuals of his time, manuals of 
history, philosophy, and religion. His most enduring 
literary work, however, was the inspiration and possibly 
partial authorship of the * Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,' a 
series of annals beginning with the Christian era, kept at 
various monasteries, and recording year by year (down 
to two centuries and a half after Alfred's own death), 
the most important events of history, chiefly that of 
England. jKfost of the entries in the 'Chronicle' are bare 
and brief, but sometimes, especially in the accounts of 
Alfred's own splendid exploits, a writer is roused to 
spirited narrative, occasionally in verse ; and in the tenth 
century two great battles against invading Northmen, 
at Brunanburh and Maldon, produced the only important 
extant pieces of Anglo-Saxon poetry which certainly be- 



40 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

long to the West Saxon period. 

For literature, indeed, the West-Saxon period has very 
little permanent significance. Plenty of its other writing 
remains in the shape of religious prose — sermons, lives and 
legends of saints, biblical paraphrases, and similar work 
in which the monastic and priestly spirit took delight, but 
which is generally dull with the dulness of medieval com- 
monplace didacticism and fantastic symbolism.t The 
country, too, was still distracted with wars. ] Within 
fifty years after Alfred's death, to be sure, his descendants 
had won back the whole of England from 'Danish' rule 
(though the 'Danes,' then constituting half the popula- 
tion of the north and east, have remained to the present 
day a large element in the English race). But near the 
end of the tenth century new swarms of 'Danes' reap- 
peared from the Baltic lands, once more slaughtering 
and devastating, until at last in the eleventh century the 
'Danish' though Christian Canute ruled for twenty years 
over all England. In such a time there could be little in- 
tellectual or literary life. But the decline of the Anglo- 
Saxon literature speaks also partly of stagnation in the 
race itself. The people, though still sturdy, seem to have 
become somewhat dull from inbreeding and to have re- 
quired an infusion of altogether different blood from 
without. This necessary renovation was to be violently 
forced upon them, for in 1066 Duke William of Nor- 
mandy landed at Pevensey with his army of adventurers 
and his ill-founded claim to the crown, and before him 
at Hastings fell the gallant Harold and his nobles. By 
the fortune of this single fight, followed only by stern 
suppression of spasmodic outbreaks, William established 
himself and his vassals as masters of the land. England 
ceased to be Anglo-Saxon and became, altogether polit- 
ically, and partly in race, Norman-French, a change more 
radical and far-reaching than any which it has since 
undergone.* 

* Vivid though inaccurate pictures of life and events at the 
time of the Norman Conquest are given in Bulwer-Lytton 's 
' Harold ' and Charles Kingsley's 'Hereward the Wake.' Tenny- 
son's tragedy ' Harold' is much better than either, though more 
limited in scope. 



CHAPTER II 

PERIOD II. THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD. A. D. 1066 TO ABOUT 

1350* 

The Normans. The Normans who conquered England 
were originally members of the same stock as the 'Danes' 
who had harried and conquered it in the preceding cen- 
turies — the ancestors of both were bands of Baltic and 
North Sea pirates who merely happened to emigrate in 
different directions; and a little farther back the Nor- 
mans were close cousins, in the general Germanic family, 
of the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The exploits of this 
whole race of Norse sea-kings make one of the most 
remarkable chapters in the history of medieval Europe. 
In the ninth and tenth centuries they mercilessly ravaged 
all the coasts not only of the West but of all Europe 
from the Rhine to the Adriatic. 'From the fury of the 
Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us ! ' was a regular part 
of the litany of the unhappy French. They settled Ice- 
land and Greenland and prematurely discovered America ; 
they established themselves as the ruling aristocracy in 
Russia and as the imperial body-guard and chief bulwark 
of the Byzantine empire at Constantinople ; and in the 
eleventh century they conquered southern Italy and Sicily, 
whence in the first crusade they pressed on with un- 
abated vigor to Asia Minor. Those bands of them with 
whom we are here concerned, and who became known dis- 
tinctively as Normans, fastened themselves as settlers, 
early in the eleventh century, on the northern shore of 
France, and in return for their acceptance of Christian- 
ity and acknowledgment of the nominal feudal sover- 
eignty of the French king were recognized as rightful 

* Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' the best-known work of fiction dealing with 
any part of this period, is interesting, but as a picture of life at the 
end of the twelfth century is very misleading. The date assigned 
to his 'Betrothed,' one of his less important novels, is about 
the same. 



42 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

possessors of the large province which thus came to bear 
the name of Normandy. Here by intermarriage with 
the native women they rapidly developed into a race 
which while retaining all their original courage and enter- 
prise took on also, together with the French language, 
the French intellectual brilliancy and flexibility and in 
manners became the chief exponent of medieval chivalry. 

The different elements contributed to the modern Eng- 
lish character by the latest stocks which have been united 
in it have been indicated by Matthew Arnold in a famous 
passage ('On the Study of Celtic Literature') : 'The 
Germanic [Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish'] genius has stead- 
iness as its main basis, with commonness and humdrum 
for its defect, fidelity to nature for its excellence. The 
Norman genius, talent for affairs as its main basis, with 
strenuousness and clear rapidity for its excellence, hard- 
ness and insolence for its defect.' The Germanic (Anglo- 
Saxon and 'Danish') element explains, then, why un- 
educated Englishmen of all times have been thick-headed, 
unpleasantly self-assertive, and unimaginative, but sturdy 
fighters; and the Norman strain why upper-class Eng- 
lishmen have been self-contained, inclined to snobbish- 
ness, but vigorously aggressive and persevering, among 
the best conquerors, organizers, and administrators in 
the history of the world. 

Social Results of the Conquest. In most respects, or all, 
the Norman conquest accomplished precisely that racial 
rejuvenation of which, as we have seen, Anglo-Saxon 
England stood in need. For the Normans brought with 
them from France the zest for joy and beauty and digni- 
fied and stately ceremony in which the Anglo-Saxon tem- 
perament was poor — they brought the love of light- 
hearted song and chivalrous sports, of rich clothing, of 
finely-painted manuscripts, of noble architecture in ca- 
thedrals and palaces, of formal religious ritual, and of the 
pomp and display of all elaborate pageantry. In the 
outcome they largely reshaped the heavy mass of Anglo- 
Saxon life into forms of grace and beauty and brightened 
its duller surface with varied and brilliant colors. For 
the Anglo-Saxons themselves, however, the Conquest 
meant at first little else than that bitterest and most com- 
plete of all national disasters, hopeless subjection to a 



THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 43 

tyrannical and contemptuous foe. The Normans were not 
heathen, as the 'Danes' had been, and they were too few 
in number to wish to supplant the conquered people; 
but they imposed themselves, both politically and socially, 
as stern and absolute masters. King AYilliam confirmed 
in their possessions the few Saxon nobles and lesser land- 
owners who accepted his rule and did not later revolt; 
but both pledges and interest compelled him to bestow 
most of the estates of the kingdom, together with the 
widows of their former holders, on his own nobles and 
the great motley throng of turbulent fighters who had 
made up his invading army. In the lordships and manors, 
therefore, and likewise in the great places of the Church, 
were established knights and nobles, the secular ones 
holding in feudal tenure from the king or his immediate 
great vassals, and each supported in turn by Norman 
men-at-arms ; and to them were subjected as serfs, work- 
ers bound to the land, the greater part of the Saxon 
population. As visible signs of the changed order ap- 
peared here and there throughout the country massive 
and gloomy castles of stone, and in the larger cities, in 
place of the simple Anglo-Saxon churches, cathedrals 
lofty and magnificent beyond all Anglo-Saxon dreams. 
What sufferings, at the worst, the Normans inflicted on 
the Saxons is indicated in a famous passage of the 'Anglo- 
Saxon Chronicle,' an entry seventy years subsequent to 
the Conquest, of which the least distressing part may be 
thus paraphrased: 

'They filled the land full of castles.* They compelled 
the wretched men of the land to build their castles and 
wore them out with hard labor. When the castles were 
made they filled them with devils and evil men. Then 
they took all those whom they thought to have any prop- 
erty, both by night and by day, both men and women, 
and put them in prison for gold and silver, and tormented 
them with tortures that cannot be told; for never were 
any martyrs so tormented as these were.' 

The Union of the Races and Languages. Latin, French, 
and English. That their own race and identity were 

* This was only during a period of anarchy. For the most part 
the nobles lived in manor houses, very rude according to our ideas. 
See Traill's 'Social England,' I, 536 ff. 



44 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

destined to be absorbed in those of the Anglo-Saxons 
could never have occurred to any of the Normans who 
stood with William at Hastings, and scarcely to any of 
their children. Yet this result was predetermined by the 
stubborn tenacity and numerical superiority of the con- 
quered people and by the easy adaptability of the Nor- 
man temperament. Racially, and to a less extent socially, 
intermarriage did its work, and that within a very few 
generations. Little by little, also, Norman contempt and 
Saxon hatred were softened into tolerance, and at last 
even into a sentiment of national unity. This sentiment 
was finally to be confirmed by the loss of Normandy and 
other French possessions of the Norman-English kings in 
the thirteenth century, a loss which transformed England 
from a province of the Norman Continental empire and 
of a foreign nobility into an independent country, and 
further by the wars ('The Hundred Years' War') which 
England — Norman nobility and Saxon yeomen fighting 
together — carried on in France in the fourteenth century. 
In language and literature the most general immediate 
result of the Conquest was to make of England a tri- 
lingual country, where Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon 
were spoken separately side by side. With Latin, the 
tongue of the Church and of scholars, the Norman clergy 
were much more thoroughly familiar than the Saxon 
priests had been; and the introduction of the richer 
Latin culture resulted, in the latter half of the twelfth 
century, at the court of Henry II, in a brilliant outburst 
of Latin literature. In England, as well as in the rest 
of Western Europe, Latin long continued to be the lan- 
guage of religious and learned writing — down to the six- 
teenth century or even later. French, that dialect of it 
which was spoken by the Normans — Anglo-French (Eng- 
lish-French) it has naturally come to be called — was of 
course introduced by the Conquest as the language of the 
governing and upper social class, and in it also during 
the next three or four centuries a considerable body of 
literature was produced. Anglo-Saxon, which we may 
now term English, remained inevitably as the language 
of the subject race, but their literature was at first 
crushed down into insignificance. Ballads celebrating 
the resistance of scattered Saxons to their oppressors no 



THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 45 

doubt circulated widely on the lips of the people, but 
English writing of the more formal sorts almost absolutely 
ceased for more than a century, to make a new beginning 
about the year 1200. In the interval the 'Anglo-Saxon 
'Chronicle ' is the only important document, and even this, 
continued at the monastery of Peterboro, comes to an 
end in 1154, in the midst of the terrible anarchy of 
Stephen's reign. 

It must not be supposed, notwithstanding, that the 
Normans, however much they despised the English lan- 
guage and literature, made any effort to destroy it. On 
the other hand, gradual union of the two languages was 
no less inevitable than that of the races themselves. From 
the very first the need of communication with their sub- 
jects must have rendered it necessary for the Normans 
to acquire some knowledge of the English language; and 
the children of mixed parentage of course learned it from 
their mothers. The use of French continued in the upper 
strata of society, in the few children's schools that ex- 
isted, and in the law courts, for something like three cen- 
turies, maintaining itself so long partly because French 
was then the polite language of "Western Europe. But 
the dead pressure of English was increasingly strong, and 
by the end of the fourteenth century and of Chaucer's 
life French had chiefly given way to it even at Court.* 
As we have already implied, however, the English which 
triumphed was in fact English-French — English was en- 
abled to triumph partly because it had now largely ab- 
sorbed the French. For the first one hundred or one 
hundred and fifty years, it seems, the two languages re- 
mained for the most part pretty clearly distinct, but in 
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries English, abandon- 
ing its first aloofness, rapidly took into itself a large 
part of the French (originally Latin) vocabulary; and 
under the influence of the French it carried much farther 
the process of dropping its own comparatively compli- 
cated grammatical inflections — a process which had al- 
ready gained much momentum even before the Conquest. 
This absorption of the French was most fortunate for 

* For details see O. F. Emerson's 'History of the English Lan- 
guage,' chapter 4; and T. E. Lounsbury's 'History of the English 
Language. ' 



46 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

English. To the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary — vigorous, but 
harsh, limited in extent, and lacking in fine discrimina- 
tions and power of abstract expression, was now added 
nearly the whole wealth of French, with its fullness, flexi- 
bility, and grace. As a direct consequence the resulting 
language, modern English, is the richest and most varied 
instrument of expression ever developed at any time by 
any race. 

The Result for Poetry. For poetry the fusion meant 
even more than for prose. The metrical system which be- 
gins to appear in the thirteenth century and comes to 
perfection a century and a half later in Chaucer's poems 
combined what may fairly be called the better features 
of both the systems from which it was compounded. We 
have seen that Anglo-Saxon verse depended on regular 
stress of a definite number of quantitatively long syllables 
in each line and on alliteration; that it allowed much 
variation in the number of unstressed syllables ; and that 
it was without rime. French verse, on the other hand, 
had rime (or assonance) and carefully preserved iden- 
tity in the total number of syllables in corresponding 
lines, but it was uncertain as regarded the number of 
clearly stressed ones. The derived English system adopted 
from the French (1) rime and (2) identical line-length, 
and retained from the Anglo-Saxon (3) regularity of 
stress. (4) It largely abandoned the Anglo-Saxon regard 
for quantity and (5) it retained alliteration not as a basic 
principle but as an (extremely useful) subordinate device. 
This metrical system, thus shaped, has provided the in- 
dispensable formal basis for making English poetry ad- 
mittedly the greatest in the modern world. 

The English Dialects. The study of the literature of 
the period is further complicated by the division of Eng- 
lish into dialects. The Norman Conquest put a stop to 
the progress of the West- Saxon dialect toward complete 
supremacy, restoring the dialects of the other parts of 
the island to their former positions of equal authority. 
The actual result was the development of three groups 
of dialects, the Southern, Midland (divided into East and 
West) and Northern, all differing among themselves in 
forms and even in vocabulary. Literary activity when it 
recommenced was about equally distributed among the 



THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 47 

three, and for three centuries it was doubtful which of 
them would finally win the first place. In the outcome 
success fell to the East Midland dialect, partly through 
the influence of London, which under the Norman kings 
replaced Winchester as the capital city and seat of the 
Court and Parliament, and partly through the influence 
of the two Universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which 
gradually grew up during the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
turies and attracted students from all parts of the coun- 
try. This victory of the East Midland form was marked 
by, though it was not in any large degree due to, the 
appearance in the fourteenth century of the first great 
modern English poet, Chaucer. To the present day, how- 
ever, the three dialects, and subdivisions of them, are 
easily distinguishable in colloquial use ; the common idiom 
of such regions as Yorkshire and Cornwall is decidedly 
different from that of London or indeed any other part of 
the country. 

The English Literature as a Part of General Medieval 
European Literature. One of the most striking general 
facts in the later Middle Ages is the uniformity of life in 
many of its aspects throughout all "Western Europe.* It 
was only during this period that the modern nations, ac- 
quiring national consciousness, began definitely to shape 
themselves out of the chaos which had followed the fall 
of the Roman Empire. The Roman Church, firmly estab- 
lished in every corner of every land, was the actual in- 
heritor of much of the unifying power of the Roman 
government, and the feudal system everywhere gave to 
society the same political organization and ideals. In 
a truer sense, perhaps, than at any later time, Western 
Europe was one great brotherhood, thinking much the 
same thoughts, speaking in part the same speech, and 
actuated by the same beliefs. At least, the literature of the 
period, largely composed and copied by the great army 
of monks, exhibits everywhere a thorough uniformity in 
types and ideas. 

We of the twentieth century should not allow ourselves 
to think vaguely of the Middle Ages as a benighted or 

* Differences are clearly presented in Charles Keade's novel, 'The 
Cloister and the Hearth,' though this deals with the period fol- 
lowing: that with which we are here concerned. 



48 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

shadowy period when life and the people who consti- 
tuted it had scarcely anything in common with ourselves. 
In reality the men of the Middle Ages were moved by the 
same emotions and impulses as our own, and their lives 
presented the same incongruous mixture of nobility and 
baseness. Yet it is true that the externals of their ex- 
istence were strikingly different from those of more re- 
cent times. In society the feudal system — lords with 
their serfs, towns struggling for municipal independence, 
kings and nobles doing, peaceably or with violence, very 
much what they pleased; a constant condition of public 
or private war; cities walled as a matter of course for 
protection against bands of robbers or hostile armies ; the 
country still largely covered with forests, wildernesses, 
and fens; roads infested with brigands and so bad that 
travel was scarcely possible except on horseback; in pri- 
vate life, most of the modern comforts unknown, and the 
houses, even of the wealthy, so filthy and uncomfortable 
that all classes regularly, almost necessarily, spent most 
of the daylight hours in the open air ; in industry no coal, 
factories, or large machinery, but in the towns guilds of 
workmen each turning out by hand his slow product of 
single articles; almost no education except for priests 
and monks, almost no conceptions of genuine science or 
history, but instead the abstract system of scholastic logic 
and philosophy, highly ingenious but highly fantastic ; in 
religion no outward freedom of thought except for a few 
courageous spirits, but the arbitrary dictates of a despotic 
hierarchy, insisting on an ironbound creed which the re- 
morseless process of time was steadily rendering more 
and more inadequate — this offers some slight suggestion 
of the conditions of life for several centuries, ending 
with the period with which we are now concerned. 

In medieval literature likewise the modern student en- 
counters much which seems at first sight grotesque. One 
of the most conspicuous examples is the pervasive use of 
allegory. The men of the Middle Ages often wrote, as 
we do, in direct terms and of simple things, but when they 
wished to rise above the commonplace they turned with 
a frequency which to-day appears astonishing to the de- 
vices of abstract personification and veiled meanings. No 
doubt this tendency was due in part to an idealizing dis- 



THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 49 

satisfaction with the crudeness of their actual life (as well 
as to frequent inability to enter into the realm of deeper 
and finer thought without the aid of somewhat mechanical 
imagery) ; and no doubt it was greatly furthered also by 
the medieval passion for translating into elaborate and 
fantastic symbolism all the details of the Bible narratives. 
But from whatever cause, the tendency hardened into a 
ruling convention ; thousands upon thousands of medieval 
manuscripts seem to declare that the world is a mirage 
of shadowy forms, or that it exists merely to body forth 
remote and highly surprising ideas. 

Of all these countless allegories none was reiterated 
with more unwearied persistence than that of the Seven 
Deadly Sins (those sins which in the doctrine of the 
Church lead to spiritual death because they are wilfully 
committed). These sins are: Covetousness, Unchastity, 
Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Sloth, and, chief of all, Pride, the 
earliest of all, through which Lucifer was moved to his 
fatal rebellion against God, whence spring all human ills. 
Each of the seven, however, was interpreted as including 
so many related offences that among them they embraced 
nearly the whole range of possible wickedness. Personi- 
fied, the Seven Sins in themselves almost dominate me- 
dieval literature, a sort of shadowy evil pantheon. Moral 
and religious questions could scarcely be discussed with- 
out regard to them ; and they maintain their commanding 
place even as late as in Spenser's 'Faerie Queene,' at the 
very end of the sixteenth century. To the Seven Sins 
were commonly opposed, but with much less emphasis, 
the Seven Cardinal Virtues, Faith, Hope, Charity (Love), 
Prudence, Temperance, Chastity, and Fortitude. Again, 
almost as prominent as the Seven Sins was the figure of 
Fortune with her revolving wheel, a goddess whom the 
violent vicissitudes and tragedies of life led the men of 
the Middle Ages, in spite of their Christianity, to bring 
over from classical literature and virtually to accept as a 
real divinity, with almost absolute control in human affairs. 
In the seventeenth century Shakspere's plays are full of 
allusions to her, but so for that matter is the everyday 
talk of all of us in the twentieth century. 

Literature in the Three Languages. It is not to the pur- 
pose in a study like the present to give special attention to 



50 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the literature written in England in Latin and French; 
we can speak only briefly of that composed in English. 
But in fact when the English had made its new beginning, 
about the year 1200, the same general forms flourished in 
all three languages, so that what is said in general of the 
English applies almost as much to the other two as well. 

Religious Literature. We may virtually divide all the 
literature of the period, roughly, into (1) Religious and 
(2) Secular. But it must be observed that religious writ- 
ings were far more important as literature during the 
Middle Ages than in more recent times, and the separa- 
tion between religious and secular less distinct than at 
present. The forms of the religious literature were largely 
the same as in the previous period. There were songs, 
many of them addressed to the Virgin, some not only 
beautiful in their sincere and tender devotion, speaking 
for the finer spirits in an age of crudeness and violence, 
but occasionally beautiful as poetry. There were para- 
phrases of many parts of the Bible, lives of saints, in 
both verse and prose, and various other miscellaneous 
work. Perhaps worthy of special mention among single 
productions is the 'Cursor Mundi' (Surveyor of the 
World), an early fourteenth century poem of twenty- four 
thousand lines ('Paradise Lost' has less than eleven thou- 
sand), relating universal history from the beginning, on 
the basis of the Biblical narrative. Most important of all 
for their promise of the future, there were the germs of 
the modern drama in the form of the Church plays; but 
to these we shall give special attention in a later chapter. 

Secular Literature. In secular literature the variety 
was greater than in religious. We may begin by tran- 
scribing one or two of the songs, which, though not as 
numerous then as in some later periods, show that the 
great tradition of English secular lyric poetry reaches 
back from our own time to that of the Anglo-Saxons 
without a break. The best known of all is the 'Cuckoo 
Song,' of the thirteenth century, intended to be sung in 
harmony by four voices: 

Sumer is icumen in ; 

Lhude sing, cnccu! 
Groweth sed and bloweth med 

And springth the wde nu. 



THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 51 

Sing, cuccu! 
Awe bleteth after lomb, 

Lhouth after calve cu. 
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth; 
Murie sing, cuccu! 
Cuccu, cuccu, 
Wei singes thu, cuccu; 
Ne swik thu never nu. 

Summer is come in; loud sing, cuckoo! Grows the seed and 
blooms the mead [meadow] And buds the wood anew. Sing, 
cuckoo! The ewe bleats for the lamb, Lows for the calf the cow. 
The bullock gambols, the buck leaps; Merrily sing, cuckoo! Cuckoo, 
cuckoo, Well singest thou, cuckoo; Cease thou never now. 

The next is the first stanza of 'Alysoun' ('Pair Alice') : 

Bytuene Mersh ant Averil, 

When spray beginnth to springe, 
The lutel foul hath hire wyl 
On hyre lud to synge. 
Ich libbe in love-longinge 
For semlokest of alle thinge; 
He may me blisse bringe; 
Icham in hire baundoun. 

An hendy hap ichabbe yhent; 
Ichot from hevene it is me sent; 
From alle wymmen mi love is lent 
Ant lyht on Alysoun. 

Between March and April, When the sprout begins to spring, 
The little bird has her desire In her tongue to sing. I live in 
love-longing For the fairest of all things; She may bring me bliss; 
I am at her mercy. A lucky lot I have secured; I think from heaven 
it is sent me; From all women my love is turned And is lighted 
on Alysoun. 

There were also political and satirical songs and mis- 
cellaneous poems of various sorts, among them certain 
'Bestiaries,' accounts of the supposed habits of animals, 
generally drawn originally from classical tradition, and 
most of them highly fantastic and allegorized in the in- 
terests of morality and religion. There was an abundance 
of extremely realistic coarse tales, hardly belonging to 
literature, in both prose and verse. The popular ballads 
of the fourteenth century we must reserve for later con- 
sideration. Most numerous of all the prose works, per- 
haps, were the Chronicles, which were produced generally 
in the monasteries and chiefly in the twelfth and thir- 
teenth centuries, the greater part in Latin, some in French, 



52 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and a few in rude English verse. Many of them were 
mere annals like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, hut some 
were the lifelong works of men with genuine historical 
vision. Some dealt merely with the history of England, 
or a part of it, others with that of the entire world as it 
was known to medieval Europe. The majority will never 
be withdrawn from the obscurity of the manuscripts on 
which the patient care of their authors inscribed them; 
others have been printed in full and serve as the main 
basis for our knowledge of the events of the period. 

The Romances. But the chief form of secular litera- 
ture during the period, beginning in the middle of the 
twelfth century, was the romance, especially the metrical 
(verse) romance. The typical romances were the literary 
expression of chivalry. They were composed by the pro- 
fessional minstrels, some of whom, as in Anglo-Saxon 
times, were richly supported and rewarded by kings and 
nobles, while others still wandered about the country, 
always welcome in the manor-houses. There, like Scott's 
Last Minstrel, they recited their sometimes almost end- 
less works from memory, in the great halls or in the 
ladies' bowers, to the accompaniment of occasional strains 
on their harps. For two or three centuries the romances 
were to the lords and ladies, and to the wealthier citizens 
of the towns, much what novels are to the reading public 
of our own day. By far the greater part of the romances 
current in England were written in French, whether by 
Normans or by French natives of the English provinces 
in France, and the English ones which have been pre- 
served are mostly translations or imitations of French 
originals. The romances are extreme representatives of 
the whole class of literature of all times to which they 
have given the name. Frankly abandoning in the main 
the world of reality, they carry into that of idealized and 
glamorous fancy the chief interests of the medieval lords 
and ladies, namely, knightly exploits in war, and love- 
making. Love in the romances, also, retains all its courtly 
affectations, together with that worship of woman by man 
which in the twelfth century was exalted into a senti- 
mental art by the poets of wealthy and luxurious Provence 
in Southern France. Side by side, again, with war and 
love, appears in the romances medieval religion, likewise 



THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 53 

conventionalized and childishly superstitions, but in some 
inadequate degree a mitigator of cruelty and a restrainer 
of lawless passion. Artistically, in some respects or all, 
the greater part of the romances are crude and immature. 
Their usual main or only purpose is to hold attention by 
successions of marvellous adventures, natural or super- 
natural ; of structure, therefore, they are often destitute ; 
the characters are ordinarily mere types ; and motivation 
is little considered. There were, however, exceptional 
authors, genuine artists, masters of meter and narrative, 
possessed by a true feeling for beauty ; and in some of the 
romances the psychological analysis of love, in particular, 
is subtile and powerful, the direct precursor of one of the 
main developments in modern fiction. 

The romances may very roughly be grouped into four 
great classes. First in time, perhaps, come those which 
are derived from the earlier French epics and in which 
love, if it appears at all, is subordinated to the military 
exploits of Charlemagne and his twelve peers in their 
wars against the Saracens. Second are the romances 
which, battered salvage from a greater past, retell in 
strangely altered romantic fashion the great stories of 
classical antiquity, mainly the achievements of Alexander 
the Great and the tragic fortunes of Troy. Third come 
the Arthurian romances, and fourth those scattering mis- 
cellaneous ones which do not belong to the other classes, 
dealing, most of them, with native English heroes. Of 
these, two, 'King Horn' and 'Havelok, ' spring direct from 
the common people and in both substance and expression 
reflect the hard reality of their lives, while ' Guy of War- 
wick' and 'Bevis of Hampton,' which are among the 
best known but most tedious of all the list, belong, in 
their original form, to the upper classes. 

Of all the romances the Arthurian are by far the most 
important. They belong peculiarly to English literature, 
because they are based on traditions of British history, 
but they have assumed a very prominent place in the 
literature of the whole western world. Rich in varied 
characters and incidents to which a universal significance 
could be attached, in their own time they were the most 
popular works of their class; and living on vigorously 
after the others were forgotten, they have continued to 



54 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

form one of the chief quarries of literary material and 
one of the chief sources of inspiration for modern poets 
and romancers. It seems well worth while, therefore, to 
outline briefly their literary history. 

The period in which their scene is nominally laid is 
that of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Great Britain. Of 
the actual historical events of this period extremely little 
is known, and even the capital question whether such a 
person as Arthur ever really existed can never receive a 
definite answer. The only contemporary writer of the 
least importance is the Briton (priest or monk), Gildas, 
who in a violent Latin pamphlet of about the year 550 
('The Destruction and Conquest of Britain') denounces 
his countrymen for their sins and urges them to unite 
against the Saxons; and Gildas gives only the slightest 
sketch of what had actually happened. He tells how a 
British king (to whom later tradition assigns the name 
Vortigern) invited in the Anglo-Saxons as allies against 
the troublesome northern Scots and Picts, and how the 
Anglo-Saxons, victorious against these tribes, soon turned 
in furious conquest against the Britons themselves, until, 
under a certain Ambrosius Aurelianus, a man 'of Roman 
race,' the Britons successfully defended themselves and 
at last in the battle of Mount Badon checked the Saxon 
advance. 

Next in order after Gildas, but not until about the year 
800, appears a strangely jumbled document, last edited 
by a certain Nennius, and entitled 'Historia Britonum' 
(The History of the Britons), which adds to Gildas' out- 
line traditions, natural and supernatural, which had mean- 
while been growing up among the Britons (Welsh). It 
supplies the names of the earliest Saxon leaders, Hengist 
and Horsa (who also figure in the 'Anglo-Saxon Chron- 
icle') , and narrates at length their treacherous dealings with 
Vortigern. Among other stories we find that of Vorti- 
gern 's tower, where Gildas' Ambrosius appears as a boy 
of supernatural nature, destined to develop in the ro- 
mances into the great magician Merlin. In Nennius' book 
occurs also the earliest mention of Arthur, who, in a 
comparatively sober passage, is said, some time after the 
days of Vortigern, to have 'fought against the Saxons, 
together with the kings of the Britons, but he himself 



THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 55 

was leader in the battles.' A list, also, is given of his 
twelve victories, ending with Mount Badon. It is im- 
possible to decide whether there is really any truth in 
this account of Nennius, or whether it springs wholly 
from the imagination of the Britons, attempting to solace 
themselves for their national overthrow; but it allows us 
to believe if we choose that sometime in the early sixth 
century there was a British leader of the name of Arthur, 
who by military genius rose to high command and for a 
while beat back the Saxon hordes. At most, however, it 
should be clearly realized, Arthur was probably only a 
local leader in some limited region, and, far from filling 
the splendid place which he occupies in the later ro- 
mances, was but the hard-pressed captain of a few thou- 
sand barbarous and half-armed warriors. 

For three hundred years longer the traditions about 
Arthur continued to develop among the Welsh people. 
The most important change which took place was Ar- 
thur 's elevation to the position of chief hero of the British 
(Welsh) race and the subordination to him, as his fol- 
lowers, of all the other native heroes, most of whom had 
originally been gods. To Arthur himself certain divine 
attributes were added, such as his possession of magic 
weapons, among them the sword Excalibur. It also came 
to be passionately believed among the Welsh that he was 
not really dead but would some day return from the mys- 
terious Other World to which he had withdrawn and 
reconquer the island for his people. It was not until the 
twelfth century that these Arthurian traditions, the cher- 
ished heritage of the Welsh and their cousins, the Bretons 
across the English Channel in France, were suddenly 
adopted as the property of all Western Europe, so that 
Arthur became a universal Christian hero. This remark- 
able transformation, no doubt in some degree inevitable, 
was actually brought about chiefly through the instru- 
mentality of a single man, a certain English archdeacon 
of Welsh descent, Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey, a 
literary and ecclesiastical adventurer looking about for a 
means of making himself famous, put forth about the 
year 1136, in Latin, a 'History of the Britons' from the 
earliest times to the seventh century, in which, imitating 
the form of the serious chronicles, he combined in cleverly 



56 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

impudent fashion all the adaptable miscellaneous material, 
fictitious, legendary, or traditional, which he found at 
hand. In dealing with Arthur, Geoffrey greatly enlarges 
on Gildas and Nennius; in part, no doubt, from his own 
invention, in part, perhaps, from "Welsh tradition. He 
provides Arthur with a father, King Uther, makes of 
Arthur's wars against the Saxons only his youthful ex- 
ploits, relates at length how Arthur conquered almost all 
of Western Europe, and adds to the earlier story the fig- 
ures of Merlin, Guenevere, Modred, Gawain, Kay, and 
Bedivere. What is not least important, he gives to Ar- 
thur's reign much of the atmosphere of feudal chivalry 
which was that of the ruling class of his own age. 

Geoffrey may or may not have intended his astonish- 
ing story to be seriously accepted, but in fact it was 
received with almost universal credence. For centuries it 
was incorporated in outline or in excerpts into almost all 
the sober chronicles, and what is of much more impor- 
tance for literature, it was taken up and rehandled in 
various fashions by very numerous romancers. About 
twenty years after Geoffrey wrote, the French poet Wace, 
an English subject, paraphrased his entire ' History' in 
vivid, fluent, and diffuse verse. Wace imparts to the 
whole, in a thorough-going way, the manners of chivalry, 
and adds, among other things, a mention of the Round 
Table, which Geoffrey, somewhat chary of the super- 
natural, had chosen to omit, though it was one of the 
early elements of the Welsh tradition. Other poets fol- 
lowed, chief among them the delightful Chretien of Troyes, 
all writing mostly of the exploits of single knights at 
Arthur's court, which they made over, probably, from 
scattering tales of Welsh and Breton mythology. To 
declare that most romantic heroes had been knights of 
Arthur's circle now became almost a matter of course. 
Prose romances also appeared, vast formless compilations, 
which gathered up into themselves story after story, ac- 
cording to the fancy of each successive editor. Greatest 
of the additions to the substance of the cycle was the 
story of the Holy Grail, originally an altogether inde- 
pendent legend. Important changes necessarily de- 
veloped. Arthur himself, in many of the romances, was 
degraded from his position of the bravest knight to be 



THE NORMAN-FRENCH PERIOD 57 

the inactive figurehead of a brilliant court ; and the only 
really historical element in the story, his struggle against 
the Saxons, was thrust far into the background, while 
all the emphasis was laid on the romantic achievements 
of the single knights. 

Laghamon 's 'Brut.' Thus it had come about that Ar- 
thur, originally the national hero of the Welsh and the 
deadly foe of the English, was adopted, as a Christian 
champion, not only for one of the medieval Nine Worthies 
of all history, but for the special glory of the English 
race itself. In that light he figures in the first impor- 
tant work in which native English reemerges after the 
Norman Conquest, the 'Brut' (Chronicle) wherein, about 
the year 1200, LaghamOn paraphrased Wace's paraphrase 
of Geoffrey.* Laghamon was a humble parish priest in 
Worcestershire, and his thirty-two thousand half-lines, in 
which he imperfectly follows the Anglo-Saxon alliterative 
meter, are rather crude ; though they are by no means 
dull, rather are often strong with the old-time Anglo- 
Saxon fighting spirit. In language also the poem is al- 
most purely Saxon; occasionally it admits the French 
device of rime, but it is said to exhibit, all told, fewer 
than a hundred words of French origin. Expanding 
throughout on Wace's version, Laghamon adds some 
minor features ; but English was not yet ready to take a 
place beside French and Latin with the reading class, 
and the poem exercised no influence on the development 
of the Arthurian story or on English literature. 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We can make 
special mention of only one other romance, which all 
students should read in modern translation, namely, 'Sir 
Gawain (pronounced Gaw'-wain) and the Green Knight.' 
This is the brief and carefully constructed work of an 
unknown but very real poetic artist, who lived a century 
and more later than Laghamon and probably a little ear- 
lier than Chaucer. The story consists of two old folk- 

* Laghamon 's name is generally written ' Layamon, * but this is 
incorrect. The word 'Brut' comes from the name ' Brutus/ ac- 
cording to Geoffrey a Trojan hero and eponymous founder of the 
British race. Standing at the beginning of British (and English) 
history, his name came to be applied to the whole of it, just as 
the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta, have given the name 
to the alphabet. 



58 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tales, here finely united in the form of an Arthurian 
romance and so treated as to bring out all the better 
side of knightly feeling, with which the author is in 
charming sympathy. Like many other medieval writings, 
this one is preserved by mere chance in a single manu- 
script, which contains also three slightly shorter religious 
poems (of a thousand or two lines apiece), all possibly 
by the same author as the romance. One of them in par- 
ticular, 'The Pearl,' is a narrative of much fine feeling, 
which may well have come from so true a gentleman as 
he. The dialect is that of the Northwest Midland, scarcely 
more intelligible to modern readers than Anglo-Saxon, but 
it indicates that the author belonged to the same border 
region between England and Wales from which came 
also Geoffrey of Monmouth and Laghamon, a region where 
Saxon and Norman elements were mingled with Celtic 
fancy and delicacy of temperament. The meter, also, 
is interesting — the Anglo-Saxon unrimed alliterative 
verse, but divided into long stanzas of irregular length, 
each ending in a 'bob' of five short riming lines. 

'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' may very fittingly 
bring to a close our hasty survey of the entire Norman- 
French period, a period mainly of formation, which has 
left no literary work of great and permanent fame, but 
in which, after all, there were some sincere and talented 
writers, who have fallen into forgetfulness rather through 
the untoward accidents of time than from lack of genuine 
merit in themselves. 



CHAPTER III 

PERIOD III. THE END OP THE MIDDLE AGES. ABOUT 1350 TO 
ABOUT 1500 

The First Fifty Years. Political and Social Conditions. 

Of the century and a half, from 1350 to 1500, which forms 
our third period, the most important part for literature 
was the first fifty years, which constitutes the age of 
Chaucer. 

The middle of the fourteenth century was also the 
middle of the externally brilliant fifty years' reign of 
Edward III. In 1337 Edward had begun the terrible 
though often-interrupted series of campaigns in France 
which historians group together as the Hundred Years' 
War, and having won the battle of Creey against amaz- 
ing odds, he had inaugurated at his court a period of 
splendor and luxury. The country as a whole was really 
increasing in prosperity ; Edward was fostering trade, and 
the towns and some of the town-merchants were becoming 
wealthy; but the oppressiveness of the feudal system, 
now becoming outgrown, was apparent, abuses in so- 
ciety and state and church were almost intolerable, and 
the spirit which was to create our modern age, beginning 
already in Italy to move toward the Renaissance, was 
felt in faint stirrings even so far to the North as Eng- 
land. 

The towns, indeed, were achieving their freedom. 
Thanks to compact organization, they were loosening the 
bonds of their dependence on the lords or bishops to 
whom most of them paid taxes ; and the alliance of their 
representatives with the knights of the shire (country 
gentlemen) in the House of Commons, now a separate 
division of Parliament, was laying the foundation of the 
political power of the whole middle class. But the feudal 
system continued to rest cruelly on the peasants. Still 
bound, most of them, to the soil, as serfs of the land or 

59 



60 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tenants with definite and heavy obligations of service, 
living in dark and filthy hovels nnder indescribably un- 
healthy conditions, earning a wretched subsistence by 
ceaseless labor, and almost altogether at the mercy of 
masters who regarded them as scarcely better than beasts, 
their lot was indeed pitiable. Nevertheless their spirit 
was not broken nor their state so hopeless as it seemed. 
It was by the archers of the class of yeomen (small free- 
holders), men akin in origin and interests to the peasants, 
that the victories in the French wars were won, and the 
knowledge that this was so created in the peasants an 
increased self-respect and an increased dissatisfaction. 
Their groping efforts to better their condition received 
strong' stimulus also from the ravages of the terrible Black 
Death, a pestilence which, sweeping off at its first visita- 
tion, in 1348, at least half the population, and on two 
later recurrences only smaller proportions, led to a scar- 
city of laborers and added strength to their demand for 
commutation of personal services by money-payments and 
for higher wages. This demand was met by the ruling 
classes with sternly repressive measures, and the social- 
istic Peasants ' Revolt of John Ball and Wat Tyler in 1381 
was violently crushed out in blood, but it expressed a 
great human cry for justice which could not permanently 
be denied. 

Hand in hand with the State and its institutions, in 
this period as before, stood the Church. Holding in the 
theoretical belief of almost every one the absolute power 
of all men's salvation or spiritual death, monopolizing 
almost all learning and education, the Church exercised 
in the spiritual sphere, and to no small extent in the tem- 
poral, a despotic tyranny, a tyranny employed sometimes 
for good, sometimes for evil. As the only even partially 
democratic institution of the age it attracted to itself the 
most ambitious and able men of all classes. Though so- 
cial and personal influence were powerful within its doors, 
as always in all human organizations, nevertheless the 
son of a serf for whom there was no other means of es- 
cape from his servitude might steal to the nearest monas- 
tery and there, gaining his freedom by a few months of 
concealment, might hope, if he proved his " ability, to 
rise to the highest position, to become abbot, bishop or 



THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 61 

perhaps even Pope. Within the Church were many sin- 
cere and able men unselfishly devoting their lives to the 
service of their fellows ; but the moral tone of the organi- 
zation as a whole had suffered from its worldly prosperity 
and power. In its numerous secular lordships and mo- 
nastic orders it had become possessor of more than half 
the land in England, a proportion constantly increased 
through the legacies left by religious-minded persons for 
their souls' salvation; but from its vast income, several 
times greater than that of the Crown, it paid no taxes, 
and owing allegiance only to the Pope it was in effect a 
foreign power, sometimes openly hostile to the national 
government. The monasteries, though still performing 
important public functions as centers of education, char- 
ity, and hospitality, had relaxed their discipline, and 
the lives of the monks were often scandalous. The Do- 
minican and Franciscan friars, also, who had come to 
England in the thirteenth century, soon after the foun- 
dation of their orders in Italy, and who had been full at 
first of passionate zeal for the spiritual and physical wel- 
fare of the poor, had now departed widely from their 
early character and become selfish, luxurious, ignorant, 
and unprincipled. Much the same was true of the 'secu- 
lar' clergy (those not members of monastic orders, cor- 
responding to the entire clergy of Protestant churches). 
Then there were such unworthy charlatans as the pardon- 
ers and professional pilgrims, traveling everywhere under 
special privileges and fleecing the credulous of their 
money with fraudulent relics and preposterous stories 
of edifying adventure. All this corruption was clear 
enough to every intelligent person, and we shall find it 
an object of constant satire by the authors of the age, 
but it was too firmly established to be easily or quickly 
rooted out. 

'Mandeville's Voyage.' One of the earliest literary 
works of the period, however, was uninfluenced by these 
social and moral problems, being rather a very complete 
expression of the naive medieval delight in romantic mar- 
vels. This is the highly entertaining 'Voyage and Travels 
of Sir John Mandeville.' This clever book was actually 
written at Liege, in what is now Belgium, sometime be- 
fore the year 1370, and in the French language; from 



62 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

which, attaining enormous popularity, it was several 
times translated into Latin and English, and later into 
various other languages. Five centuries had to pass before 
scholars succeeded in demonstrating that the asserted 
author, 'Sir John Mandeville,' never existed, that the 
real author is undiscoverable, and that this pretended ac- 
count of his journeyings over all the known and imagined 
world is a compilation from a large number of previous 
works. Yet the book (the English version along with the 
others) really deserved its long-continued reputation. Its 
tales of the Ethiopian Prester John, of diamonds that by 
proper care can be made to grow, of trees whose fruit is 
an odd sort of lambs, and a hundred other equally remark- 
able phenomena, are narrated with skilful verisimilitude 
and still strongly hold the reader's interest, even if they 
no longer command belief. With all his credulity, too, 
the author has some odd ends of genuine science, among 
others the conviction that the earth is not flat but round. 
In style the English versions reflect the almost universal 
medieval uncertainty of sentence structure; nevertheless 
they are straightforward and clear; and the book is 
notable as the first example in English after the Norman 
Conquest of prose used not for religious edification but 
for amusement (though with the purpose also of giving 
instruction). 'Mandeville,' however, is a very minor 
figure when compared with his great contemporaries, es- 
pecially with the chief of them, Geoffrey Chaucer. 

Geoffrey Chaucer, 1338-1400. Chaucer (the name is 
French and seems to have meant originally 'shoemaker') 
came into the world probably in 1338, the first important 
author who was born and lived in London, which with 
him becomes the center of English literature. About 
his life, as about those of many of our earlier writers, 
there remains only very fragmentary information, which 
in his case is largely pieced together from scattering en- 
tries of various kinds in such documents as court account 
books and public records of state matters and of lawsuits. 
His father, a wine merchant, may have helped supply 
the cellars of the king (Edward III) and so have been 
able to bring his son to royal notice ; at any rate, while 
still in his teens Geoffrey became a page in the service 
of one of the king's daughters-in-law. In this position 



THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 63 

his duty would be partly to perform various humble work 
in the household, partly also to help amuse the leisure 
of the inmates, and it is easy to suppose that he soon 
won favor as a fluent story-teller. He early became ac- 
quainted with the seamy as well as the brilliant side of 
courtly life ; for in 1359 he was in the campaign in France 
and was taken prisoner. That he was already valued 
appears from the king's subscription of the equivalent 
of a thousand dollars of present-day money toward his 
ransom; and after his release he was transferred to the 
king's own service, where about 1368 he was promoted to 
the rank of esquire. He was probably already married 
to one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting. Chaucer was now 
thirty years of age, and his practical sagacity and knowl- 
edge of men had been recognized; for from this time on 
he held important public positions. He was often sent to 
the Continent — to France, Flanders, and Italy — on diplo- 
matic missions; and for eleven years he was in charge 
of the London customs, where the uncongenial drudgery 
occupied almost all his time until through the intercession 
of the queen he was allowed to perform it by deputy. 
In 1386 he was a member of Parliament, knight of the 
shire for Kent; but in that year his fortune turned — he 
lost all his offices at the overthrow of the faction of his 
patron, Duke John of Gaunt (uncle of the young king, 
Richard II, who had succeeded his grandfather, Edward 

III, some years before). Chaucer's party and himself 
were soon restored to power, but although during the re- 
maining dozen years of his life he received from the 
Court various temporary appointments and rewards, he 
appears often to have been poor and in need. When 
Duke Henry of Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt, de- 
posed the king and himself assumed the throne as Henry 

IV, Chaucer's prosperity seemed assured, but he lived 
after this for less than a year, dying suddenly in 1400. 
He was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first of the 
men of letters to be laid in the nook which has since be- 
come the Poets' Corner. 

Chaucer's poetry falls into three rather clearly marked 
periods. First is that of French influence, when, though 
writing in English, he drew inspiration from the rich 
French poetry of the period, which was produced partly 



64 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in Prance, partly in England. Chaucer experimented with 
the numerous lyric forms which the French poets had 
brought to perfection; he also translated, in whole or in 
part, the most important of medieval French narrative 
poems, the thirteenth century 'Romance of the Rose' of 
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung, a very clever 
satirical allegory, in many thousand lines, of medieval 
love and medieval religion. This poem, with its Gallic 
brilliancy and audacity, long exercised over Chaucer's 
mind the same dominant influence which it possessed over 
most secular poets of the age. Chaucer's second period, 
that of Italian influence, dates from his first visit to 
Italy in 1372-3, where at Padua he may perhaps have 
met the fluent Italian poet Petrarch, and where at any 
rate the revelation of Italian life and literature must 
have aroused his intense enthusiasm. From this time, 
and especially after his other visit to Italy, five years 
later, he made much direct use of the works of Petrarch 
and Boccaccio and to a less degree of those of their 
greater predecessor, Dante, whose severe spirit was too 
unlike Chaucer's for his thorough appreciation. The long- 
est and finest of Chaucer's poems of this period, 'Troilus 
and Criseyde,' is based on a work of Boccaccio; here 
Chaucer details with compelling power the sentiment 
and tragedy of love, and the psychology of the heroine 
who had become for the Middle Ages a central figure in 
the tale of Troy. Chaucer's third period, covering his 
last fifteen years, is called his English period, because 
now at last his genius, mature and self-sufficient, worked 
in essential independence. First in time among his poems 
of these years stands 'The Legend of Good Women,' a 
series of romantic biographies of famous ladies of classical 
legend and history, whom it pleases Chaucer to designate 
as martyrs of love; but more important than the stories 
themselves is the Prolog, where he chats with delightful 
frankness about his own ideas and tastes. 

The great work of the period, however, and the crown- 
ing achievement of Chaucer's life, is 'The Canterbury 
Tales.' Every one is familiar with the plan of the story 
(which may well have had some basis in fact) : how 
Chaucer finds himself one April evening with thirty 
other men and women, all gathered at the Tabard Inn in 



THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 65 

Southwark (a suburb of London and just across the 
Thames from the city proper), ready to start next morn- 
ing, as thousands of Englishmen did every year, on a pil- 
grimage to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canter- 
bury. The travelers readily accept the proposal of Harry 
Bailey, their jovial and domineering host, that he go with 
them as leader and that they enliven the journey with a 
story-telling contest (two stories from each pilgrim dur- 
ing each half of the journey) for the prize of a dinner at 
his inn on their return. Next morning, therefore, the 
Knight begins the series of tales and the others follow in 
order. This literary form — a collection of disconnected 
stories bound together in a fictitious framework — goes 
back almost to the beginning of literature itself; but 
Chaucer may well have been directly influenced by Boc- 
caccio's famous book of prose tales, 'The Decameron ' 
(Ten Days of Story-Telling). Between the two works, 
however, there is a striking contrast, which has often 
been pointed out. While the Italian author represents 
his gentlemen and ladies as selfishly fleeing from the 
misery of a frightful plague in Florence to a charming 
villa and a holiday of unreflecting pleasure, the gaiety 
of Chaucer's pilgrims rests on a basis of serious purpose, 
however conventional it may be. 

Perhaps the easiest way to make clear the sources of 
Chaucer's power will be by means of a rather formal 
summary. 

1. His Personality. Chaucer's personality stands out 
in his writings plainly and most delightfully. It must 
be borne in mind that, like some others of the greatest 
poets, he was not a poet merely, but also a man of prac- 
tical affairs, in the eyes of his associates first and mainly 
a courtier, diplomat, and government official. His wide 
experience of men and things is manifest in the life-like- 
ness and mature power of his poetry, and it accounts in 
part for the broad truth of all but his earliest work, which 
makes it essentially poetry not of an age but for all time. 
Something of conventional medievalism still clings to 
Chaucer in externals, as we shall see, but in alertness, in- 
dependence of thought, and a certain directness of utter- 
ance, he speaks for universal humanity. His practical 
experience helps to explain as well why, unlike most great 



66 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

poets, he does not belong primarily with the idealists. 
Fine feeling he did not lack ; he loved external beauty — 
some of his most pleasing passages voice his enthusiasm 
for Nature ; and down to the end of his life he never lost 
the zest for fanciful romance. His mind and eye were 
keen, besides, for moral qualities; he penetrated directly 
through all the pretenses of falsehood and hypocrisy; 
while how thoroughly he understood and respected honest 
worth appears in the picture of the Poor Parson in the 
Prolog to 'The Canterbury Tales.' Himself quiet and 
self-contained, moreover, Chaucer was genial and sym- 
pathetic toward all mankind. But all this does not de- 
clare him a positive idealist, and in fact, rather, he was 
willing to accept the world as he found it — he had no 
reformer 's dream of ' shattering it to bits and remoulding 
it nearer to the heart's desire.' His moral nature, indeed, 
was easy-going; he was the appropriate poet of the Court 
circle, with very much of the better courtier's point of 
view. At the day's tasks he worked long and faithfully, 
but he also loved comfort, and he had nothing of the 
martyr's instinct. To him human life was a vast proces- 
sion, of boundless interest, to be observed keenly and re- 
produced for the reader's enjoyment in works of objective 
literary art. The countless tragedies of life he noted with 
kindly pity, but he felt no impulse to dash himself against 
the existing barriers of the world in the effort to assure 
a better future for the coming generations. In a word, 
Chaucer is an artist of broad artistic vision to whom 
art is its own excuse for being. And when everything 
is said few readers would have it otherwise with him; 
for in his art he has accomplished what no one else in 
his place could have done, and he has left besides the pic- 
ture of himself, very real and human across the gulf of 
half a thousand years. Religion, we should add, was for 
him, as for so many men of the world, a somewhat sec- 
ondary and formal thing. In his early works there is 
much conventional piety, no doubt sincere so far as it 
goes; and he always took- a strong intellectual interest in 
the problems of medieval theology ; but he became steadily 
and quietly independent in his philosophic outlook and 
indeed rather skeptical of all definite dogmas. 

Even in his art Chaucer's lack of the highest will-power 



THE END OP THE MIDDLE AGES 67 

produced one rather conspicuous formal weakness; of his 
numerous long poems he really finished scarcely one. For 
this, however, it is perhaps sufficient excuse that he could 
write only in intervals hardly snatched from business 
and sleep. In 'The Canterbury Tales,' indeed, the plan 
is almost impossibly ambitious; the more than twenty 
stories actually finished, with their eighteen thousand lines, 
are only a fifth part of the intended number. Even so, 
several of them do not really belong to the series; com- 
posed in stanza forms, they are selected from his earlier 
poems and here pressed into service, and on the average 
they are less excellent than those which he wrote for their 
present places (in the rimed pentameter couplet that he 
adopted from the French). 

2. His Humor. In nothing are Chaucer's personality 
and his poetry more pleasing than in the rich humor which 
pervades them through and through. Sometimes, as in 
his treatment of the popular medieval beast-epic material 
in the Nun's Priest's Tale of the Fox and the Cock, the 
humor takes the form of boisterous farce ; but much 
more often it is of the finer intellectual sort, the sort 
which a careless reader may not catch, but which touches 
with perfect sureness and charming lightness on all the 
incongruities of life, always, too, in kindly spirit, No 
foible is too trifling for Chaucer's quiet observation; while 
if he does not choose to denounce the hypocrisy of the 
Pardoner and the worldliness of the Monk, he has made 
their weaknesses sources of amusement (and indeed object- 
lessons as well) for all the coming generations. 

3. He is one of the greatest of all narrative poets. 
Chaucer is an exquisite lyric poet, but only a few of his 
lyrics have come down to us, and his fame must always 
rest largely on his narratives. Here, first, he possesses 
unfailing fluency. It was with rapidity, evidently with 
ease, and with masterful certainty, that he poured out his 
long series of vivid and delightful tales. It is true that in 
his early, imitative, work he shares the medieval faults of 
wordiness, digression, and abstract symbolism; and, like 
most medieval writers, he chose rather to reshape material 
from the great contemporary store than to invent stories of 
his own. But these are really very minor matters. He has 
great variety, also, of narrative forms: elaborate alle- 



68 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

gories; love stories of many kinds; romances, both re- 
ligious and secular; tales of chivalrous exploit, like that 
related by the Knight ; humorous extravaganzas ; and 
jocose renderings of coarse popular material — something, 
at least, in virtually every medieval type. 

4. The thorough knowledge and sure portrayal of men 
and women which belong to his mature work extend 
through many various types of character. It is a common- 
place to say that the Prolog to 'The Canterbury Tales' 
presents in its twenty portraits virtually every contem- 
porary English class except the very lowest, made to live 
forever in the finest series of character sketches preserved 
anywhere in literature; and in his other work the same 
power appears in only less conspicuous degree. 

5. His poetry is also essentially and thoroughly dra- 
matic, dealing very vividly with life in genuine and varied 
action. To be sure, Chaucer possesses all the medieval love 
for logical reasoning, and he takes a keen delight in psy- 
chological analysis; but when he introduces these things 
(except for the tendency to medieval diffuseness) they are 
true to the situation and really serve to enhance the sus- 
pense. There is much interest in the question often raised 
whether, if he had lived in an age like the Elizabethan, 
when the drama was the dominant literary form, he too 
would have been a dramatist. 

6. As a descriptive poet (of things as well as persons) 
he displays equal skill. Whatever his scenes or objects, 
he sees them with perfect clearness and brings them in 
full life-likeness before the reader's eyes, sometimes even 
with the minuteness of a nineteenth century novelist. And 
no one understands more thoroughly the art of conveying 
the general impression with perfect sureness, with a fore- 
ground where a few characteristic details stand out in 
picturesque and telling clearness. 

7. Chaucer is an unerring master of poetic form. His 
stanza combinations reproduce all the well-proportioned 
grace of his French models, and to the pentameter riming 
couplet of his later work he gives the perfect ease and 
metrical variety which match the fluent thought. In all 
his poetry there is probably not a single faulty line. And 
yet within a hundred years after his death, such was the 
irony of circumstances, English pronunciation had so 



THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 69 

greatly altered that his meter was held to be rude and 
barbarous, and not until the nineteenth century were its 
principles again fully understood. His language, we 
should add, is modern, according to the technical classifi- 
cation, and is really as much like the form of our own day 
as like that of a century before his time; but it is still 
only early modern English, and a little definitely directed 
study is necessary for any present-day reader before its 
beauty can be adequately recognized. 

The main principles for the pronunciation of Chaucer's language, 
so far as it differs from ours, are these: Every letter should be 
sounded, especially the final e (except when it is to be suppressed 
before another vowel). A large proportion of the rimes are there- 
fore feminine. The following vowel sounds should be observed: 
Stressed a like modern a in father. Stressed e and ee like e in 
fete or ea in breath. Stressed i as in machine, oo like o in open. 
u commonly as in push or like oo in spoon, y like i in machine or 
pin according as it is stressed or not. ai, ay, ei, and ey like ay in 
day. au commonly like ou in pound, ou like oo in spoon. -ye 
(final) is a diphthong, g (not in ng and not initial) before e or i 
is like j. 

Lowell has named in a suggestive summary the chief 
quality of each of the great English poets, with Chaucer 
standing first in order: 'Actual life is represented by 
Chaucer; imaginative life by Spenser; ideal life by Shak- 
spere; interior life by Milton; conventional life by Pope.' 
We might add: the life of spiritual mysticism and sim- 
plicity by Wordsworth; the completely balanced life by 
Tennyson; and the life of moral issues and dramatic mo- 
ments by Robert Browning. 

John Gower. The three other chief writers contempo- 
rary with Chaucer contrast strikingly both with him and 
with each other. Least important is John Gower (pro- 
nounced either Go-er or Gow-er), a wealthy landowner 
whose tomb, with his effigy, may still be seen in St. Savior 's, 
Southwark, the church of a priory to whose rebuilding he 
contributed and where he spent his latter days. Gower 
was a confirmed conservative, and time has left him 
stranded far in the rear of the forces that move and live. 
Unlike Chaucer's, the bulk of his voluminous poems reflect 
the past and scarcely hint of the future. The earlier and 
larger part of them are written in French and Latin, and 



70 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in 'Vox Clamantis' (The Voice of One Crying in the 
Wilderness) he exhausts the vocabulary of exaggerated 
bitterness in denouncing the common people for the in- 
surrection in which they threatened the privileges and 
authority of his own class. Later on, perhaps through 
Chaucer's example, he turned to English, and in 'Con- 
fessio Amantis' (A Lover's Confession) produced a series 
of renderings of traditional stories parallel in general 
nature to 'The Canterbury Tales.' He is generally a 
smooth and fluent versifier, but his fluency is his undoing; 
he wraps up his material in too great a mass of verbiage. 

The Vision Concerning Piers the Plowman. The active 
moral impulse which Chaucer and Gower lacked, and a 
consequent direct confronting of the evils of the age, ap- 
pear vigorously in the group of poems written during the 
last forty years of the century and known from the title 
in some of the manuscripts as ' The Vision of William Con- 
cerning Piers the Plowman.' Prom the sixteenth century, 
at least, until very lately this work, the various versions of 
which differ greatly, has been supposed to be the single 
poem of a single author, repeatedly enlarged and revised by 
him; and ingenious inference has constructed for this sup- 
posed author a brief but picturesque biography under the 
name of William Langland. Recent investigation, however, 
has made it seem at least probable that the work grew to its 
final form through additions by several successive writers 
who have not left their names and whose points of view 
were not altogether identical. 

Like the slightly earlier poet of 'Sir Gawain and the 
Green Knight,' the authors belonged to the region of the 
Northwest Midland, near the Malvern Hills, and like him, 
they wrote in the Anglo-Saxon verse form, alliterative, 
unrimed, and in this case without stanza divisions. Their 
language, too, the regular dialect of this region, differs 
very greatly, as we have already implied, from that of 
Chaucer, with much less infusion from the French; to 
the modern reader, except in translation, it seems uncouth 
and unintelligible. But the poem, though in its final state 
prolix and structurally formless, exhibits great power not 
only of moral conviction and emotion, but also of expres- 
sion — vivid, often homely, but not seldom eloquent. 

The ' first passus ' begins with the sleeping author 's vision 



THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 71 

of 'a field full of folk' (the world), bounded on one side 
by a cliff with the tower of Truth, and on the other by a 
deep vale wherein frowns the dungeon of "Wrong. Society 
in all its various classes and occupations is very dramatic- 
ally presented in the brief description of the ' field of folk, ' 
with incisive passing satire of the sins and vices of each 
class. 'Gluttonous wasters' are there, lazy beggars, lying 
pilgrims, corrupt friars and pardoners, venal lawyers, and, 
with a lively touch of realistic humour, cooks and their 
'knaves' crying, 'Hot pies!' But a sane balance is pre- 
served — there are also worthy people, faithful laborers, 
honest merchants, and sincere priests and monks. Soon 
the allegory deepens. Holy Church, appearing, instructs 
the author about Truth and the religion which consists in 
loving God and giving help to the poor. A long portrayal 
of the evil done by Lady Meed (love of money and worldly 
rewards) prepares for the appearance of the hero, the 
sturdy plowman Piers, who later on is even identified in a 
hazy way with Christ himself. Through Piers and his 
search for Truth is developed the great central teaching 
of the poem, the Gospel of Work — the doctrine, namely, 
that society is to be saved by honest labor, or in general 
by the faithful service of every class in its own sphere. 
The Seven Deadly Sins and their fatal fruits are empha- 
sized, and in the later forms of the poem the corruptions 
of wealth and the Church are indignantly denounced, with 
earnest pleading for the religion of practical social love to 
all mankind. 

In its own age the influence of ' Piers the Plowman ' 
was very great. Despite its intended impartiality, it was 
inevitably adopted as a partisan document by the poor and 
oppressed, and together with the revolutionary songs of 
John Ball it became a powerful incentive to the Peasant's 
Insurrection. Piers himself became and continued an ideal 
for men who longed for a less selfish and brutal world, 
and a century and a half later the poem was still cherished 
by the Protestants for its exposure of the vices of the 
Church. Its medieval form and setting remove it hope- 
lessly beyond the horizon of general readers of the present 
time, yet it furnishes the most detailed remaining picture 
of the actual social and economic conditions of its age, 
and as a great landmark in the progress of moral and so- 



72 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

cial thought it can never lose its significance. 

The Wiclifite Bible. A product of the same general 
forces which inspired 'Piers the Plowman' is the earliest 
in the great succession of the modern English versions of 
the Bible, the one connected with the name of John 
Wiclif, himself the first important English precursor of 
the Reformation. "Wiclif was born about 1320, a York- 
shireman of very vigorous intellect as well as will, but in 
all his nature and instincts. a direct representative of the 
common people. During the greater part of his life he was 
connected with Oxford University, as student, teacher (and 
therefore priest), and college head. Early known as one 
of the ablest English thinkers and philosophers, he was 
already opposing certain doctrines and practices of the 
Church when he was led to become a chief spokesman for 
King Edward and the nation in their refusal to pay the 
tribute which King John, a century and a half before, had 
promised to the Papacy and which was now actually de- 
manded. As the controversies proceeded, "Wiclif was 
brought at last to formulate the principle, later to be basal 
in the whole Protestant movement, that the final source of 
religious authority is not the Church, but the Bible. One 
by one he was led to attack also other fundamental doc- 
trines and institutions of the Church — transubstantiation, 
the temporal possessions of the Church, the Papacy, and at 
last, for their corruption, the four orders of friars. In 
the outcome the Church proved too strong for even Wiclif, 
and Oxford, against its will, was compelled to abandon 
him; yet he could be driven no farther than to his parish 
of Lutterworth, where he died undisturbed in 1384. 

His connection with literature was an unforeseen but 
natural outgrowth of his activities. Some years before his 
death, with characteristic energy and zeal, he had begun to 
spread his doctrines by sending out 'poor priests' and 
laymen who, practicing the self-denying life of the friars 
of earlier days, founded the Lollard sect.* It was inevi- 
table not only that he and his associates should compose 
many tracts and sermons for the furtherance of their views, 
but, considering their attitude toward the Bible, that they 
should wish to put it into the hands of all the people in a 
form which they would be able to understand, that is in 

* The name, given by their enemies, perhaps means ' tares. ' 



THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 73 

their own vernacular English. Hence sprang the Wiclifite 
translation. The usual supposition that from the outset, 
before the time of Wiclif , the Church had prohibited trans- 
lations of the Bible from the Latin into the common 
tongues is a mistake; that policy was a direct result of 
Wiclif 's work. In England from Anglo-Saxon times, as 
must be clear from what has here already been said, par- 
tial English translations, literal or free, in prose or verse, 
had been in circulation among the few persons who could 
read and wished to have them. But Wiclif proposed to 
popularize the entire book, in order to make the con- 
science of every man the final authority in every question 
of belief and religious practice, and this the Church would 
not allow. It is altogether probable that Wiclif personally 
directed the translation which has ever since borne his 
name; but no record of the facts has come down to us, 
and there is no proof that he himself was the actual author 
of any part of it — that work may all have been done by 
others. The basis of the translation was necessarily the 
Latin 'Vulgate' (Common) version, made nine hundred 
years before from the original Hebrew and Greek by St. 
Jerome, which still remains to-day, as in Wiclif 's time, 
the official version of the Eoman church. The first Wicli- 
fite translation was hasty and rather rough, and it was soon 
revised and bettered by a certain John Purvey, one of 
the 'Lollard' priests. 

Wiclif and the men associated with him, however, were 
always reformers first and writers only to that end. Their 
religious tracts are formless and crude in style, and even 
their final version of the Bible aims chiefly at fidelity of 
rendering. In general it is not elegant, the more so because 
the authors usually follow the Latin idioms and sen- 
tence divisions instead of reshaping them into the native 
English style. Their text, again, is often interrupted by 
the insertion of brief phrases explanatory of unusual 
words. The vocabulary, adapted to the unlearned readers, 
is more largely Saxon than in our later versions, and the 
older inflected forms appear oftener than in Chaucer; so 
that it is only through our knowledge of the later versions 
that we to-day can read the work without frequent stum- 
bling. Nevertheless this version has served as the starting 
point for almost all those that have come after it in English, 



74 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

as even a hasty reader of this one mnst be conscious; 
and no reader can fail to admire in it the sturdy Saxon 
vigor which has helped to make our own version one of 
the great masterpieces of English literature. 

The Fifteenth Century. With Chaucer's death in 
1400 the half century of original creative literature in 
which he is the main figure comes to an end, and for a 
hundred and fifty years thereafter there is only a single 
author of the highest rank. For this decline political 
confusion is the chief cause; first, in the renewal of the 
Hundred Years' "War, with its sordid effort to deprive 
another nation of its liberty, and then in the brutal and 
meaningless War of the Roses, a mere cut-throat civil 
butchery of rival factions with no real principle at 
stake. Throughout the fifteenth century the leading 
poets (of prose we will speak later) were avowed imi- 
tators of Chaucer, and therefore at best only second- 
rate writers. Most of them were Scots, and best known 
is the Scottish king, James I. For tradition seems cor- 
rect in naming this monarch as the author of a pretty 
poem, 'The King's Quair' ('The King's Quire,' that is 
Book), which relates in a medieval dream allegory of 
fourteen hundred lines how the captive author sees and 
falls in love with a lady whom in the end Fortune prom- 
ises to bestow upon him. This may well be the poetic 
record of King James' eighteen-year captivity in Eng- 
land and his actual marriage to a noble English wife. 
In compliment to him Chaucer's stanza of seven lines 
(riming dbabbcc) , which King James employs, has re- 
ceived the name of 'rime royal.' 

The 'Popular' Ballads. Largely to the fifteenth cen- 
tury, however, belong those of the English and Scottish 
'popular' ballads which the accidents of time have not 
succeeded in destroying. We have already considered 
the theory of the communal origin of this kind of poetry 
in the remote pre-historic past, and have seen that the 
ballads continue to flourish vigorously down to the later 
periods of civilization (above, pages 32-33). The still ex- 
isting English and Scottish ballads are mostly, no doubt, 
the work of individual authors of the fifteenth and six- 
teenth centuries, but none the less they express the lit- 
tle-changing mind and emotions of the great body of 



THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 75 

the common people who had been singing and repeating 
ballads for so many thousand years. Really essentially 
'popular,' too, in spirit are the more pretentious poems 
of the wandering professional minstrels, which have been 
handed down along with the others, just as the minstrels 
were accustomed to recite both sorts indiscriminately. 
Such minstrel ballads are the famous ones on the battle of 
Chevy Chase, or Otterburn. The production of genuine 
popular ballads began to wane in the fifteenth century 
when the printing press gave circulation to the output of 
cheap London writers and substituted reading for the 
verbal memory by which the ballads had been transmitted, 
portions, as it were, of a half mysterious and almost sacred 
tradition. Yet the existing ballads yielded slowly, linger- 
ing on in the remote regions, and those which have been 
preserved were recovered during the eighteenth and nine- 
teenth centuries by collectors from simple men and women 
living apart from the main currents of life, to whose hearts 
and lips they were still dear. Indeed even now the bal- 
lads and ballad-making are not altogether dead, but may 
still be found flourishing in such outskirts of civilization 
as the cowboy plains of Texas, Rocky Mountain mining 
camps, or the nooks and corners of the Southern Alle- 
ghenies. 

The true 'popular' ballads have a quality peculiarly 
their own, which renders them far superior to the six- 
teenth century imitations and which no conscious literary 
artist has ever successfully reproduced. Longfellow's 
'Skeleton in Armor' and Tennyson's 'Revenge' are stir- 
ring artistic ballads, but they are altogether different in 
tone and effect from the authentic 'popular' ones. Some 
of the elements which go to make this peculiar 'popular' 
quality can be definitely stated. 

1. The 'popular' ballads are the simple and spontaneous 
expression of the elemental emotion of the people, emo- 
tion often crude but absolutely genuine and unaffected. 
Phrases are often repeated in the ballads, just as in the 
talk of the common man, for the sake of emphasis, but there 
is neither complexity of plot or characterization nor at- 
tempt at decorative literary adornment — the story and the 
emotion which it calls forth are all in all. It is this simple, 
direct fervor of feeling, the straightforward outpouring 



76 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of the authors' hearts, that gives the ballads their power 
and entitles them to consideration among the far more 
finished works of conscious literature. Both the emotion 
and the morals of the ballads, also, are pagan, or at least 
pre-Christian; vengeance on one's enemies is as much a 
virtue as loyalty to one's friends; the most shameful sins 
are cowardice and treachery in war or love; and the love 
is often lawless. 

2. From first to last the treatment of the themes is ob- 
jective, dramatic, and picturesque. Everything is action, 
simple feeling, or vivid scenes, with no merely abstract 
moralizing (except in a few unusual cases) ; and often 
much of the story or sentiment is implied rather than 
directly stated. This too, of course, is the natural man- 
ner of the common man, a manner perfectly effective 
either in animated conversation or in the chant of a min- 
strel, where expression and gesture can do so much of 
the work which the restraints of civilized society have 
transferred to words. 

3. To this spirit and treatment correspond the subjects 
of the ballads. They are such as make appeal to the 
underlying human instincts — brave exploits in individual 
fighting or in organized war, and the romance and pathos 
and tragedy of love and of the other moving situations 
of simple life. From the ' popular' nature of the ballads 
it has resulted that many of them are confined within 
no boundaries of race or nation, but, originating one here, 
one there, are spread in very varying versions throughout 
the whole, almost, of the world. Purely English, how- 
ever, are those which deal with Robin Hood and his 
'merry men,' idealized imaginary heroes of the Saxon 
common people in the dogged struggle which they main- 
tained for centuries against their oppressive feudal lords. 

4. The characters and 'properties' of the ballads of all 
classes are generally typical or traditional. There are 
the brave champion, whether noble or common man, who 
conquers or falls against overwhelming odds; the faithful 
lover of either sex; the woman whose constancy, proving 
stronger than man's fickleness, wins back her lover to her 
side at last; the traitorous old woman (victim of the blind 
and cruel prejudice which after a century or two was 
often to send her to the stake as a witch) ; the loyal little 



THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 77 

child; and some few others. 

5. The verbal style of the ballads, like their spirit, is 
vigorous and simple, generally unpolished and sometimes 
rough, but often powerful with its terse dramatic sugges- 
tiveness. The usual, though not the only, poetic form is 
the four-lined stanza in lines alternately of four and three 
stresses and riming only in the second and fourth lines. 
Besides the refrains which are perhaps a relic of com- 
munal composition and the conventional epithets which 
the ballads share with epic poetry there are numerous 
traditional ballad expressions — rather meaningless for- 
mulas and line-tags used only to complete the rime or 
meter, the common useful scrap-bag reserve of these un- 
pretentious poets. The license of Anglo-Saxon poetry in 
the number of the unstressed syllables still remains. But 
it is evident that the existing versions of the ballads are 
generally more imperfect than the original forms; they 
have suffered from the corruptions of generations of oral 
repetition, which the scholars who have recovered them 
have preserved with necessary accuracy, but which for 
appreciative reading editors should so far as possible re- 
vise away. 

Among the best or most representative single ballads: 
are: The Hunting of the Cheviot (otherwise called The 
Ancient Ballad of Chevy Chase — clearly of minstrel au- 
thorship) ; Sir Patrick Spens; Robin Hood and Guy of 
Gisborne; Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William 
of Cloudeslee; Captain Car, or Edom o' Gordon; King 
Estmere (though this has been somewhat altered by 
Bishop Percy, who had and destroyed the only surviving 
copy of it) 1 Edward, Edward; Young Waters; Sweet 
William's Ghost; Lord Thomas and Fair Annet. Kinmont 
Willie is very fine, but seems to be largely the work of 
Sir Walter Scott and therefore not truly 'popular.' 

Sir Thomas Malory and His 'Morte Darthur.' The one 
fifteenth century author of the first rank, above referred 
to, is Sir Thomas Malory (the a is pronounced as in tally). 
He is probably to be identified with the Sir Thomas Mal- 
ory who during the wars in France and the civil strife of 
the Roses that followed was an adherent of the Earls of 
Warwick and who died in 1471 under sentence of out- 
lawry by the victorious Edward IV. And some passing 



78 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

observations, at least, in his book seem to indicate that if 
he knew and had shared all the splendor and inspiration 
of the last years of medieval chivalry, he had experienced 
also the disappointment and bitterness of defeat and pro- 
longed captivity. Further than this we know of him only 
that he wrote 'Le Morte Darthur' and had finished it 
by 1467. 

Malory's purpose was to collect in a single work the 
great body of important Arthurian romance and to ar- 
range it in the form of a continuous history of King 
Arthur and his knights. He called his book 'Le Morte 
Darthur,' The Death of Arthur, from the title of several 
popular Arthurian romances to which, since they dealt 
only with Arthur's later years and death, it was prop- 
erly enough applied, and from which it seems to have 
passed into general currency as a name for the entire 
story of Arthur's life.* Actually to get together all the 
Arthurian romances was not possible for any man in 
Malory 's day, or in any other, but he gathered up a goodly 
number, most of them, at least, written in French, and 
combined them, on the whole with unusual skill, into a 
work of about one-tenth their original bulk, which still 
ranks, with all qualifications, as one of the masterpieces 
of English literature. Dealing with such miscellaneous ma- 
terial, he could not wholly avoid inconsistencies, so that, 
for example, he sometimes introduces in full health in a 
later book a knight whom a hundred pages earlier he had 
killed and regularly buried; but this need not cause the 
reader anything worse than mild amusement. Not Malory 
but his age, also, is to blame for his sometimes hazy and 
puzzled treatment of the supernatural element in his ma- 
terial. In the remote earliest form of the stories, as Celtic 
myths, this supernatural element was no doubt frank and 
very large, but Malory's authorities, the more skeptical 
French romancers, adapting it to their own age, had often 
more or less fully rationalized it; transforming, for in- 
stance, the black river of Death which the original heroes 
often had to cross on journeys to the Celtic Other World 

* Since the French word 'Morte' is feminine, the preceding 
article was originally 'La,' but the whole name had come to be 
thought of as a compound phrase and hence as masculine or neuter 
in gender. 



THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 79 

into a rude and forbidding moat about the hostile castle 
into which the romancers degraded the Other World it- 
self. Countless magic details, however, still remained re- 
calcitrant to such treatment; and they evidently troubled 
Malory, whose devotion to his story was earnest and sin- 
cere. Some of them he omits, doubtless as incredible, but 
others he retains, often in a form where the impossible is 
merely garbled into the unintelligible. For a single in- 
stance, in his seventh book he does not satisfactorily ex- 
plain why the valiant Gareth on his arrival at Arthur's 
court asks at first only for a year's food and drink. In 
the original story, we can see to-day, Gareth must have 
been under a witch's spell which compelled him to a season 
of distasteful servitude; but this motivating bit of super- 
stitition Malory discards, or rather, in this case, it had 
been lost from the story at a much earlier stage. It re- 
sults, therefore, that Malory's supernatural incidents are 
often far from clear and satisfactory; yet the reader is 
little troubled by this difficulty either in so thoroughly 
romantic a work. 

Other technical faults may easily be pointed out in 
Malory's book. Thorough unity, either in the whole or 
in the separate stories so loosely woven together, could 
not be expected * in continual reading the long succes- 
sion of similar combat after combat and the constant repe- 
tition of stereotyped phrases become monotonous for a 
present-day reader; and it must be confessed that Malory 
has little of the modern literary craftsman's power of 
close-knit style or proportion and emphasis in details. But 
these faults also may be overlooked, and the work is truly 
great, partly because it is an idealist's dream of chivalry, 
as chivalry might have been, a chivalry of faithful knights 
who went about redressing human wrongs and were loyal 
lovers and zealous servants of Holy Church; great also 
because Malory's heart is in his stories, so that he tells 
them in the main well, and invests them with a delightful 
atmosphere of romance which can never lose its fascination. 

The style, also, in the narrower sense, is strong and 
good, and does its part to make the book, except for the 
Wiclif Bible, unquestionably the greatest monument of 
English prose of the entire period before the sixteenth 
century. There is no affectation of elegance, but rather 



80 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

knightly straightforwardness which has power without lack 
of ease. The sentences are often long, but always * loose' 
and clear; and short ones are often used with the in- 
stinctive skill of sincerity. Everything is picturesque and 
dramatic and everywhere there is chivalrous feeling and 
genuine human sympathy. 

William Caxton and the Introduction of Printing to 
England, 1476. Malory's book is the first great English 
classic which was given to the world in print instead of 
written manuscript ; for it was shortly after Malory 's death 
that the printing press was brought to England by Wil- 
liam Caxton. The invention of printing, perhaps the most 
important event of modern times, took place in Germany 
not long after the middle of the fifteenth century, and 
the development of the art was rapid. Caxton, a shrewd 
and enterprising Kentishman, was by first profession a 
cloth merchant, and having taken up his residence across 
the Channel, was appointed by the king to the important 
post of Governor of the English Merchants in Flanders. 
Employed later in the service of the Duchess of Burgundy 
(sister of Edward IV), his ardent delight in romances led 
him to translate into English a French 'Recueil des His- 
toires de Troye' (Collection of the Troy Stories). To sup- 
ply the large demand for copies he investigated and mas- 
tered the new art by which they might be so wonderfully 
multiplied and about 1475, at fifty years of age, set up a 
press at Bruges in the modern Belgium, where he issued 
his 'Recueil,' which was thus the first English book ever 
put into print. During the next year, 1476, just a cen- 
tury before the first theater was to be built in London, 
Caxton returned to England and established his shop in 
Westminster, then a London suburb. During the fifteen re- 
maining years of his life he labored diligently, printing 
an aggregate of more than a hundred books, which to- 
gether comprised over fourteen thousand pages. Aside 
from Malory's romance, which he put out in 1485, the 
most important of his publications was an edition of Chau- 
cer's 'Canterbury Tales.' While laboring as a publisher 
Caxton himself continued to make translations, and in 
spite of many difficulties he, together with his assistants, 
turned into English from French no fewer than twenty- 
one distinct works. From every point of view Caxton 's 



THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 81 

services were great. As translator and editor his style 
is careless and uncertain, but like Malory's it is sincere 
and manly, and vital with energy and enthusiasm. As 
printer, in a time of rapid changes in the language, when 
through the wars in France and her growing influence 
the second great infusion of Latin-French words was 
coming into the English language, he did what could 
be done for consistency in forms and spelling. Partly 
medieval and partly modern in spirit, he may fittingly 
stand at the close, or nearly at the close, of our study of 
the medieval period. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 

For the sake of clearness we have reserved for a separate 
chapter the discussion of the drama of the whole medieval 
period, which, though it did not reach a very high literary 
level, was one of the most characteristic expressions of the 
age. It should be emphasized that to no other form does 
what we have said of the similarity of medieval literature 
throughout Western Europe apply more closely, so that 
what we find true of the drama in England would for the 
most part hold good for the other countries as well. 

Jugglers, Folk-Plays, Pageants. At the fall of the 
Roman Empire, which marks the beginning of the Middle 
Ages, the corrupt Roman drama, proscribed by the Church, 
had come to an unhonored end, and the actors had been 
merged into the great body of disreputable jugglers and 
inferior minstrels who wandered over all Christendom. 
The performances of these social outcasts, crude and im- 
moral as they were, continued for centuries unsuppressed, 
because they responded to the demand for dramatic spec- 
tacle which is one of the deepest though not least trouble- 
some instincts in human nature. The same demand was 
partly satisfied also by the rude country folk-plays, sur- 
vivals of primitive heathen ceremonials, performed at such 
festival occasions as the harvest season, which in all lands 
continue to nourish among the country people long after 
their original meaning has been forgotten. In England the 
folk-plays, throughout the Middle Ages and in remote 
spots down almost to the present time, sometimes took 
the form of energetic dances (Morris dances, they came 
to be called, through confusion with Moorish performances 
of the same general nature). Others of them, however, 
exhibited in the midst of much rough-and-tumble fighting 
and buffoonery, a slight thread of dramatic action. Their 
characters gradually came to be a conventional set, partly 
famous figures of popular tradition, such as St. George, 

82 



THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 83 

Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and the Green Dragon. Other 
offshoots of the folk-play were the 'mummings' and 'dis- 
guisings,' collective names for many forms of proces- 
sions, shows, and other entertainments, such as, among the 
upper classes, that precursor of the Elizabethan Mask in 
which a group of persons in disguise, invited or uninvited, 
attended a formal dancing party. In the later part of the 
Middle Ages, also, there were the secular pageants, spec- 
tacular displays (rather different from those of the twen- 
tieth century) given on such occasions as when a king or 
other person of high rank made formal entry into a town. 
They consisted of an elaborate scenic background set up 
near the city gate or on the street, with figures from 
allegorical or traditional history who engaged in some 
pantomime or declamation, but with very little dramatic 
dialog, or none. 

Tropes, Liturgical Plays, and Mystery Plays. But all 
these forms, though they were not altogether without 
later influence, were very minor affairs, and the real drama 
of the Middle Ages grew up, without design and by the 
mere nature of things, from the regular services of the 
Church. 

We must try in the first place to realize clearly the con- 
ditions under which the church service, the mass, was 
conducted during all the medieval centuries. "We should 
picture to ourselves congregations of persons for the most 
part grossly ignorant, of unquestioning though very super- 
ficial faith, and of emotions easily aroused to fever heat. 
Of the Latin words of the service they understood noth- 
ing; and of the Bible story they had only a very general 
impression. It was necessary, therefore, that the service 
should be given a strongly spectacular and emotional char- 
acter, and to this end no effort was spared. The great 
cathedrals and churches were much the finest buildings 
of the time, spacious with lofty pillars and shadowy re- 
cesses, rich in sculptured stone and in painted windows 
that cast on the walls and pavements soft and glowing pat- 
terns of many colors and shifting forms. The service itself 
was in great part musical, the confident notes of the full 
choir joining with the resonant organ- tones; and after all 
the rest the richly robed priests and ministrants passed 
along the aisles in stately processions enveloped in fragrant 



84 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

clouds of incense. That the eye if not the ear of the 
spectator, also, might catch some definite knowledge, the 
priests as they read the Bible stories sometimes displayed 
painted rolls which vividly pictured the principal events 
of the day's lesson. 

Still, however, a lack was strongly felt, and at last, acci- 
dentally and slowly, began the process of dramatizing the 
services. First, inevitably, to be so treated was the cen- 
tral incident of Christian faith, the story of Christ's resur- 
rection. The earliest steps were very simple. First, dur- 
ing the ceremonies on Good Friday, the day when Christ 
was crucified, the cross which stood all the year above the 
altar, bearing the Savior's figure, was taken down and 
laid beneath the altar, a dramatic symbol of the Death and 
Burial; and two days later, on 'the third day' of the 
Bible phraseology, that is on Easter Sunday, as the story 
of the Resurrection was chanted by the choir, the cross 
was uncovered and replaced, amid the rejoicings of the con- 
gregation. Next, and before the Norman Conquest, the Gos- 
pel dialog between the angel and the three Marys at the 
tomb of Christ came sometimes to be chanted by the choir in 
those responses which are called 'tropes': 'Whom seek ye in 
the sepulcher, Christians?' 'Jesus of Nazareth the 
crucified, angel.' 'He is not here; he has arisen as he 
said. Go, announce that he has risen from the sepulcher.' 
After this a little dramatic action was introduced almost as 
a matter of course. One priest dressed in white robes sat, 
to represent the angel, by one of the square-built tombs 
near the junction of nave and transept, and three others, 
personating the Marys, advanced slowly toward him while 
they chanted their portion of the same dialog. As the 
last momentous words of the angel died away a jubilant 
'Te Deum' burst from organ and choir, and every member 
of the congregation exulted, often with sobs, in the great 
triumph which brought salvation to every Christian soul. 

Little by little, probably, as time passed, this Easter 
scene was further enlarged, in part by additions from 
the closing incidents of the Savior's life. A similar treat- 
ment, too, was being given to the Christmas scene, still more 
humanly beautiful, of his birth in the manger, and occa- 
sionally the two scenes might be taken from their regular 
places in the service, combined, and presented at any 



THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 85 

season of the year. Other Biblical scenes, as well, came 
to be enacted, and, further, there were added stories from 
Christian tradition, such as that of Antichrist, and, on their 
particular days, the lives of Christian saints. Thus far 
these compositions are called Liturgical Plays, because they 
formed, in general, a part of the church service (liturgy). 
But as some of them were united into extended groups 
and as the interest of the congregation deepened, the 
churches began to seem too small and inconvenient, the 
excited audiences forgot the proper reverence, and the per- 
formances were transferred to the churchyard, and then, 
when the gravestones proved troublesome, to the market 
place, the village-green, or any convenient field. By this 
time the people had ceased to be patient with the unin- 
telligible Latin, and it was replaced at first, perhaps, and 
in part, by French, but finally by English; though prob- 
ably verse was always retained as more appropriate than 
prose to the sacred subjects. Then, the religious spirit 
yielding inevitably in part to that of merrymaking, min- 
strels and mountebanks began to flock to the celebrations; 
and regular fairs, even, grew up about them. Gradually, 
too, the priests lost their hold even on the plays them- 
selves; skilful actors from among the laymen began to 
take many of the parts; and at last in some towns the 
trade-guilds, or unions of the various handicrafts, which 
had secured control of the town governments, assumed 
entire charge. 

These changes, very slowly creeping in, one by one, had 
come about in most places by the beginning of the four- 
teenth century. In 1311 a new impetus was given to the 
whole ceremony by the establishment of the late spring 
festival of Corpus Christi, a celebration of the doctrine of 
transubstantiation. On this occasion, or sometimes on some 
other festival, it became customary for the guilds to pre- 
sent an extended series of the plays, a series which to- 
gether contained the essential substance of the Christian 
story, and therefore of the Christian faith. The Church 
generally still encouraged attendance, and not only did 
all the townspeople join wholeheartedly, but from all the 
country round the peasants flocked in. On one occasion 
the Pope promised the remission of a thousand days of 
purgatory to all persons who should be present at the 



86 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Chester plays, and to this exemption the bishop of Chester 
added sixty days more. 

The list of plays thus presented commonly included: 
The Fall of Lucifer; the Creation of the World and the 
Fall of Adam; Noah and the Flood; Abraham and Isaac 
and the promise of Christ's coming; a Procession of the 
Prophets, also foretelling Christ; the main events of the 
Gospel story, with some additions from Christian tradi- 
tion; and the Day of Judgment. The longest cycle now 
known, that at York, contained, when fully developed, fifty 
plays, or perhaps even more. Generally each play was pre- 
sented by a single guild (though sometimes two or three 
guilds or two or three plays might be combined), and 
sometimes, though not always, there was a special fitness 
in the assignment, as when the watermen gave the play 
of Noah's Ark or the bakers that of the Last Supper. In 
this connected form the plays are called the Mystery or 
Miracle Cycles.* In many places, however, detached plays, 
or groups of plays smaller than the full cycles, continued 
to be presented at one season or another. 

Each cycle as a whole, it will be seen, has a natural 
epic unity, centering about the majestic theme of the 
spiritual history and the final judgment of all Mankind. 
But unity both of material and of atmosphere suffers not 
only from the diversity among the separate plays but 
also from the violent intrusion of the comedy and the 
farce which the coarse taste of the audience demanded. 
Sometimes, in the later period, altogether original and very 
realistic scenes from actual English life were added, like 
the very clever but very coarse parody on the Nativity 
play in the 'Towneley' cycle. More often comic treatment 
was given to the Bible scenes and characters themselves. 
Noah's wife, for example, came regularly to be presented 
as a shrew, who would not enter the ark until she had been 
beaten into submission; and Herod always appears as a 
blustering tyrant, whose fame still survives in a proverb 

*' Miracle' was the medieval word in England; ' Mystery' has 
been taken by recent scholars from the medieval French usage. 
It is not connected with our usual word 'mystery,' but possibly is 
derived from the Latin 'ministerium, ' 'function,' which was the 
name applied to the trade-guild as an organization and from which 
our title 'Mr.' also comes. 



THE MEDIEVAL DKAMA 87 

of Shakspere's coinage — 'to out-Herod Herod.' 

The manner of presentation of the cycles varied much 
in different towns. Sometimes the entire cycle was still 
given, like the detached plays, at a single spot, the market- 
place or some other central square ; but often, to accommo- 
date the great crowds, there were several 'stations' at con- 
venient intervals. In the latter case each play might re- 
main all day at a particular station and be continuously 
repeated as the crowd moved slowly by ; but more often it 
was the spectators who remained, and the plays, mounted 
on movable stages, the 'pageant '-wagons, were drawn in 
turn by the guild-apprentices from one station to another. 
When the audience was stationary, the common people 
stood in the square on all sides of the stage, while persons 
of higher rank or greater means were seated on temporary 
wooden scaffolds or looked down from the windows of the 
adjacent houses. In the construction of the 'pageant' all 
the little that was possible was done to meet the needs 
of the presentation. Below the main floor, or stage, was 
the curtained dressing-room of the actors; and when the 
play required, on one side was attached 'Hell-Mouth,' a 
great and horrible human head, whence issued flames and 
fiendish cries, often the fiends themselves, and into which 
lost sinners were violently hurled. On the stage the scen- 
ery was necessarily very simple. A small raised plat- 
form or pyramid might represent Heaven, where God the 
Father was seated, and from which as the action required 
the angels came down; a single tree might indicate the 
Garden of Eden; and a doorway an entire house. In 
partial compensation the costumes were often elaborate, 
with all the finery of the church wardrobe and much of 
those of the wealthy citizens. The expense accounts of the 
guilds, sometimes luckily preserved, furnish many pic- 
turesque and amusing items, such as these: 'Four pair 
of angels' wings, 2 shillings and 8 pence.' 'For mending 
of hell head, 6 pence.' 'Item, link for setting the world 
on fire. ' Apparently women never acted ; men and boys 
took the women's parts. All the plays of the cycle were 
commonly performed in a single day, beginning, at the 
first station, perhaps as early as five o'clock in the morn- 
ing; but sometimes three days or even more were em- 
ployed. To the guilds the giving of the plays was a very 



88 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

serious matter. Often each guild had a 'pageant-house' 
where it stored its 'properties,' and a pageant-master who 
trained the actors and imposed substantial fines on mem- 
bers remiss in cooperation. 

We have said that the plays were always composed in 
verse. The stanza forms employed differ widely even 
within the same cycle, since the single plays were very 
diverse in both authorship and dates. The quality of the 
verse, generally mediocre at the outset, has often suffered 
much in transmission from generation to generation. In 
other respects also there are great contrasts; sometimes 
the feeling and power of a scene are admirable, revealing 
an author of real ability, sometimes there is only crude 
and wooden amateurishness. The medieval lack of historic 
sense gives to all the plays the setting of the authors' 
own times; Roman officers appear as feudal knights; and 
all the heathens (including the Jews) are Saracens, wor- 
shippers of 'Mahound' and 'Termagaunt'; while the good 
characters, however long they may really have lived be- 
fore the Christian era, swear stoutly by St. John and St. 
Paul and the other medieval Christian divinities. The 
frank coarseness of the plays is often merely disgusting, 
and suggests how superficial, in most cases, was the me- 
dieval religious sense. With no thought of incongruity, 
too, these writers brought God the Father onto the stage 
in bodily form, and then, attempting in all sincerity to 
show him reverence, gilded his face and put into his mouth 
long speeches of exceedingly tedious declamation. The 
whole emphasis, as generally in the religion of the times, 
was on the fear of hell rather than on the love of righteous- 
ness. Yet in spite of everything grotesque and inconsistent, 
the plays no doubt largely fulfilled their religious pur- 
pose and exercised on the whole an elevating influence. 
The humble submission of the boy Isaac to the will of God 
and of his earthly father, the yearning devotion of Mary 
the mother of Jesus, and the infinite love and pity of the 
tortured Christ himself, must have struck into even cal- 
lous hearts for at least a little time some genuine conscious- 
ness of the beauty and power of the finer and higher life. 
A literary form which supplied much of the religious and 
artistic nourishment of half a continent for half a thou- 
sand years cannot be lightly regarded or dismissed. 



THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 89 

The Morality Plays. The Mystery Plays seem to have 
reached their greatest popularity in the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries. In the dawning light of the Renais- 
sance and the modern spirit they gradually waned, though 
in exceptional places and in special revivals they did not 
altogether cease to be given until the seventeenth century. 
On the Continent of Europe, indeed, they still survive, 
after a fashion, in a single somewhat modernized form, 
the celebrated Passion Play of Oberammergau. In Eng- 
land by the end of the fifteenth century they had been 
for the most part replaced by a kindred species which had 
long been growing up beside them, namely the Morality 
Plays. 

The Morality Play probably arose in part from the de- 
sire of religious writers to teach the principles of Chris- 
tian living in a more direct and compact fashion than 
was possible through the Bible stories of the Mysteries. 
In its strict form the Morality Play was a dramatized 
moral allegory. It was in part an oifshoot from the Mys- 
teries, in some of which there had appeared among the 
actors abstract allegorical figures, either good or bad, such 
as The Seven Deadly Sins, Contemplation, and Raise- 
Slander. In the Moralities the majority of the characters 
are of this sort — though not to the exclusion of super- 
natural persons such as God and the Devil — and the hero 
is generally a type-figure standing for all Mankind. For 
the control of the hero the two definitely opposing groups 
of Virtues and Vices contend; the commonest type of 
Morality presents in brief glimpses the entire story of 
the hero's life, that is of the life of every man. It shows 
how he yields to temptation and lives for the most part 
in reckless sin, but at last in spite of all his flippancy 
and folly is saved by Perseverance and Repentance, par- 
doned through God's mercy, and assured of salvation. As 
compared with the usual type of Mystery plays the Morali- 
ties had for the writers this advantage, that they allowed 
some independence in the invention of the story ; and how 
powerful they might be made in the hands of a really 
gifted author has been finely demonstrated in our own 
time by the stage-revival of the best of them, 'Everyman' 
(which is probably a translation from a Dutch original). 
In most cases, however, the spirit of medieval allegory 



90 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

proved fatal, the genuinely abstract characters are mostly 
shadowy and unreal, and the speeches of the Virtues are 
extreme examples of intolerable sanctimonious declama- 
tion. Against this tendency, on the other hand, the per- 
sistent instinct for realism provided a partial antidote; 
the Vices are often very lifelike rascals, abstract only in 
name. In these cases the whole plays become vivid studies 
in contemporary low life, largely human and interesting 
except for their prolixity and the coarseness which they 
inherited from the Mysteries and multiplied on their own 
account. During the Reformation period, in the early 
sixteenth century, the character of the Moralities, more 
strictly so called, underwent something of a change, and 
they were sometimes made the vehicle for religious argu- 
ment, especially by Protestants. 

The Interludes. Early in the sixteenth century, the 
Morality in its turn was largely superseded by another 
sort of play called the Interlude. But just as in the case 
of the Mystery and the Morality, the Interlude developed 
out of the Morality, and the two cannot always be dis- 
tinguished, some single plays being distinctly described by 
the authors as 'Moral Interludes.' In the Interludes the 
realism of the Moralities became still more pronounced, 
so that the typical Interlude is nothing more than a coarse 
farce, with no pretense at religious or ethical meaning. 
The name Interlude denotes literally 'a play between,' 
but the meaning intended (between whom or what) is un- 
certain. The plays were given sometimes in the halls 
of nobles and gentlemen, either when banquets were in 
progress or on other festival occasions; sometimes before 
less select audiences in the town halls or on village greens. 
The actors were sometimes strolling companies of play- 
ers, who might be minstrels or rustics, and were some- 
times also retainers of the great nobles, allowed to prac- 
tice their dramatic ability on tours about the country when 
they were not needed for their masters ' entertainment. In 
the Interlude-Moralities and Interludes first appears The 
Vice, a rogue who sums up in himself all the Vices of the 
older Moralities and serves as the buffoon. One of his most 
popular exploits was to belabor the Devil about the stage 
with a wooden dagger, a habit which took a great hold 
on the popular imagination, as numerous references in 



THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA 91 

later literature testify. Transformed by time, the Vice 
appears in the Elizabethan drama, and thereafter, as the 
clown. 

The Later Influence of the Medieval Drama. The vari- 
ous dramatic forms from the tenth century to the middle 
of the sixteenth at which we have thus hastily glanced — 
folk-plays, mummings and clisguisings, secular pageants, 
Mystery plays, Moralities, and Interludes — have little but 
a historical importance. But besides demonstrating the 
persistence of the popular demand for drama, they exerted 
a permanent influence in that they formed certain stage 
traditions which were to modify or largely control the 
great drama of the Elizabethan period and to some extent 
of later times. Among these traditions were the disre- 
gard for unity, partly of action, but especially of time 
and place ; the mingling of comedy with even the intensest 
scenes of tragedy; the nearly complete lack of stage scen- 
ery, with a resultant willingness in the audience to make 
the largest possible imaginative assumptions; the presence 
of certain stock figures, such as the clown; and the presen- 
tation of women's parts by men and boys. The plays, 
therefore, must be reckoned with in dramatic history. 



CHAPTER V 

PERIOD IV. THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. THE RENAISSANCE AND 
THE REIGN OP ELIZABETH* 

The Renaissance. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 
are the period of the European Renaissance or New Birth, 
one of the three or four great transforming movements of 
European history. This impulse by which the medieval 
society of scholasticism, feudalism, and chivalry was to be 
made over into what we call the modern world came first 
from Italy. Italy, like the rest of the Roman Empire, had 
been overrun and conquered in the fifth century by the 
barbarian Teutonic tribes, but the devastation had been less 
complete there than in the more northern lands, and there, 
even more, perhaps, than in France, the bulk of the people 
remained Latin in blood and in character. Hence it re- 
sulted that though the Middle Ages were in Italy a period 
of terrible political anarchy, yet Italian culture recovered 
far more rapidly than that of the northern nations, whom 
the Italians continued down to the modern period to re- 
gard contemptuously as still mere barbarians. By the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, further, the Italians 
had become intellectually one of the keenest races whom 
the world has ever known, though in morals they were 
sinking to almost incredible corruption. Already in four- 
teenth century Italy, therefore, the movement for a much 
fuller and freer intellectual life had begun, and we have 
seen that by Petrarch and Boccaccio something of this 
spirit was transmitted to Chaucer. In England Chaucer 
was followed by the medievalizing fifteenth century, but in 
Italy there was no such interruption. 

The Renaissance movement first received definite direc- 

* George Eliot's 'Komola' gives one of the best pictures of the 
spirit of the Eenaissance in Italy. Tennyson's ' Queen Mary,' 
though it is weak as a drama, presents clearly some of the con- 
ditions of the Keformation period in England. 

92 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 93 

tion from the rediscovery and study of Greek literature, 
which clearly revealed the unbounded possibilities of life 
to men who had been groping dissatisfied within the now 
narrow limits of medieval thought. Before Chaucer was 
dead the study of Greek, almost forgotten in Western 
Europe during the Middle Ages, had been renewed in 
Italy, and it received a still further impulse when at the 
taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 Greek 
scholars and manuscripts were scattered to the West. It 
is hard for us to-day to realize the meaning for the men 
of the fifteenth century of this revived knowledge of the 
life and thought of the Greek race. The medieval Church, 
at first merely from the brutal necessities of a period of 
anarchy, had for the most part frowned on the joy and 
beauty of life, permitting pleasure, indeed, to the laity, 
but as a thing half dangerous, and declaring that there was 
perfect safety only within the walls of the nominally as- 
cetic Church itself. The intellectual life, also, nearly re- 
stricted to priests and monks, had been formalized and 
conventionalized, until in spite of the keenness of its meth- 
ods and the brilliancy of many of its scholars, it had be- 
come largely barren and unprofitable. The whole sphere 
of knowledge had been subjected to the mere authority of 
the Bible and of a few great minds of the past, such as 
Aristotle. All questions were argued and decided on the 
basis of their assertions, which had often become wholly 
inadequate and were often warped into grotesquely im- 
possible interpretations and applications. Scientific in- 
vestigation was almost entirely stifled, and progress was 
impossible. The whole field of religion and knowledge had 
become largely stagnant under an arbitrary despotism. 

To the minds which were being paralyzed under this sys- 
tem, Greek literature brought the inspiration for which 
they longed. For it was the literature of a great and bril- 
liant people who, far from attempting to make a divorce 
within man's nature, had aimed to 'see life steadily and 
see it whole, ' who, giving free play to all their powers, had 
found in pleasure and beauty some of the most essential 
constructive forces, and had embodied beauty in works of 
literature and art where the significance of the whole spirit- 
ual life was more splendidly suggested than in the achieve- 
ments of any, or almost any, other period. The enthu- 



94 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

siasm, therefore, with which the Italians turned to the 
study of Greek literature and Greek life was boundless, 
and it constantly found fresh nourishment. Every year 
restored from forgotten recesses of libraries or from the 
ruins of Roman villas another Greek author or volume or 
work of art, and those which had never been lost were 
reinterpreted with much deeper insight. Aristotle was 
again vitalized, and Plato's noble idealistic philosophy was 
once more appreciatively studied and understood. In the 
light of this new revelation Latin literature, also, which 
had never ceased to be almost superstitiously studied, took 
on a far greater human significance. Vergil and Cicero 
were regarded no longer as mysterious prophets from a 
dimly imagined past, but as real men of flesh and blood, 
speaking out of experiences remote in time from the pres- 
ent but no less humanly real. The word 'human,' indeed, 
became the chosen motto of the Renaissance scholars; 
' humanists' was the title which they applied to themselves 
as to men for whom 'nothing human was without appeal.' 
New creative enthusiasm, also, and magnificent actual new 
creation, followed the discovery of the old treasures, crea- 
tion in literature and all the arts ; culminating particularly 
in the early sixteenth century in the greatest group of 
painters whom any country has ever seen, Lionardo da 
Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. In Italy, to be sure, 
the light of the Renaissance had its palpable shadow; in 
breaking away from the medieval bondage into the un- 
hesitating enjoyment of all pleasure, the humanists too 
often overleaped all restraints and plunged into wild ex- 
cess, often into mere sensuality. Hence the Italian Renais- 
sance is commonly called Pagan, and hence when young 
English nobles began to travel to Italy to drink at the 
fountain head of the new inspiration moralists at home 
protested with much reason against the ideas and habits 
which many of them brought back with their new clothes 
and flaunted as evidences of intellectual emancipation. 
History, however, shows no great progressive movement 
unaccompanied by exaggerations and extravagances. 

The Renaissance, penetrating northward, past first from 
Italy to France, but as early as the middle of the fifteenth 
century English students were frequenting the Italian uni- 
versities. Soon the study of Greek was introduced into 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 95 

England, also, first at Oxford; and it was cultivated with 
such good results that when, early in the sixteenth century, 
the great Dutch student and reformer, Erasmus, unable 
through poverty to reach Italy, came to Oxford instead, 
he found there a group of accomplished scholars and gen- 
tlemen whose instruction and hospitable companionship 
aroused his unbounded delight. One member of this group 
was the fine-spirited John Colet, later Dean of St. Paul's 
Cathedral in London, who was to bring new life into the 
secondary education of English boys by the establishment 
of St. Paul's Grammar School, based on the principle of 
kindness in place of the merciless severity of the traditional 
English system. 

Great as was the stimulus of literary culture, it was 
only one of several influences that made up the Renais- 
sance. While Greek was speaking so powerfully to the 
cultivated class, other forces were contributing to revolu- 
tionize life as a whole and all men's outlook upon it. The 
invention of printing (above, p. 80), multiplying books 
in unlimited quantities where before there had been only 
a few manuscripts laboriously copied page by page, abso- 
lutely transformed all the processes of knowledge and al- 
most of thought. Not much later began the vast expan- 
sion of the physical world through geographical explora- 
tion. Toward the end of the fifteenth century the Portu- 
guese sailor, Vasco da Gama, finishing the work of Diaz, 
discovered the sea route to India around the Cape of Good 
Hope. A few years earlier Columbus had revealed the 
New World and virtually proved that the earth is round, 
a proof scientifically completed a generation after him 
when Magellan's ship actually circled the globe. Follow- 
ing close after Columbus, the Cabots, Italian-born, but 
naturalized Englishmen, discovered North America, and 
for a hundred years the rival ships of Spain, England, and 
Portugal filled the waters of the new West and the new 
East. In America handfuls of Spanish adventurers con- 
quered great empires and despatched home annual treasure 
fleets of gold and silver, which the audacious English sea- 
captains, half explorers and half pirates, soon learned to 
intercept and plunder. The marvels which were constantly 
being revealed as actual facts seemed no less wonderful 
than the extravagances of medieval romance ; and it was 



96 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

scarcely more than a matter of course that men should 
search in the new strange lands for the fountain of per- 
petual youth and the philosopher's stone. The super- 
natural beings and events of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' 
could scarcely seem incredible to an age where incredulity 
was almost unknown because it was impossible to set a 
bound how far any one might reasonably believe. But 
the horizon of man's expanded knowledge was not to be 
limited even to his own earth. About the year 1540, the 
Polish Copernicus opened a still grander realm of specu- 
lation (not to be adequately possessed for several cen- 
turies) by the announcement that our world is not the 
center of the universe, but merely one of the satellites of 
its far-superior sun. 

The whole of England was profoundly stirred by the 
Renaissance to a new and most energetic life, but not 
least was this true of the Court, where for a time litera- 
ture was very largely to center. Since the old nobility 
had mostly perished in the wars, both Henry VII, the 
founder of the Tudor line, and his son, Henry VIII, 
adopted the policy of replacing it with able and wealthy 
men of the middle class, who would be strongly devoted to 
themselves. The court therefore became a brilliant and 
crowded circle of unscrupulous but unusually adroit states- 
men, and a center of lavish entertainments and display. 
Under this new aristocracy the rigidity of the feudal sys- 
tem was relaxed, and life became somewhat easier for all 
the dependent classes. Modern comforts, too, were largely 
introduced, and with them the Italian arts; Tudor archi- 
tecture, in particular, exhibited the originality and splen- 
dor of an energetic and self-confident age. Further, both 
Henries, though perhaps as essentially selfish and tyran- 
nical as almost any of their predecessors, were politic and 
far-sighted, and they took a genuine pride in the pros- 
perity of their kingdom. They encouraged trade; and in 
the peace which was their best gift the well-being of the 
nation as a whole increased by leaps and bounds. 

The Reformation. Lastly, the literature of the sixteenth 
century and later was profoundly influenced by that re- 
ligious result of the Renaissance which we know as the 
Reformation. While in Italy the new impulses were 
chiefly turned into secular and often corrupt channels, 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 97 

in the Teutonic lands they deeply stirred the Teutonic con- 
science. In 1517 Martin Luther, protesting against the 
unprincipled and flippant practices that were disgracing 
religion, began the breach between Catholicism, with its 
insistence on the supremacy of the Church, and Protes- 
tantism, asserting the independence of the individual 
judgment. In England Luther's action revived the spirit 
of Lollardism, which had nearly been crushed out, and in 
spite of a minority devoted to the older system, the nation 
as a whole began to move rapidly toward change. Advo- 
cates of radical revolution thrust themselves forward in 
large numbers, while cultured and thoughtful men, in- 
cluding the Oxford group, indulged the too ideal hope of 
a gradual and peaceful reform. 

The actual course of the religious movement was deter- 
mined largely by the personal and political projects of 
Henry VIII. Conservative at the outset, Henry even at- 
tacked Luther in a pamphlet, which won from the Pope 
for himself and his successors the title ' Defender of the 
Faith.' But when the Pope finally refused Henry's de- 
mand for the divorce from Katharine of Spain, which 
would make possible a marriage with Anne Boleyn, Henry 
angrily threw off the papal authority and declared himself 
the Supreme Head of the Church in England, thus es- 
tablishing the separate English (Anglican, Episcopal) 
church. In the brief reign of Henry's son, Edward VI, 
the separation was made more decisive; under Edward's 
sister, Mary, Catholicism was restored; but the last of 
Henry's children, Elizabeth, coming to the throne in 1558, 
gave the final victory to the English communion. Under 
all these sovereigns (to complete our summary of the 
movement) the more radical Protestants, Puritans as they 
came to be called, were active in agitation, undeterred by 
frequent cruel persecution and largely influenced by the 
corresponding sects in Germany and by the Presbyterian- 
ism established by Calvin in Geneva and later by John 
Knox in Scotland. Elizabeth's skilful management long 
kept the majority of the Puritans within the English 
Church, where they formed an important element, working 
for simpler practices and introducing them in congrega- 
tions which they controlled. But toward the end of the 
century and of Elizabeth's reign, feeling grew tenser, and 



98 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

groups of the Puritans, sometimes under persecution, defi- 
nitely separated themselves from the State Church and 
established various sectarian bodies. Shortly after 1600, 
in particular, the Independents, or Congregationalists, 
founded in Holland the church which was soon to colonize 
New England. At home, under James I, the breach 
widened, until the nation was divided into two hostile 
camps, with results most radically decisive for literature. 
But for the present we must return to the early part of 
the sixteenth century. 

Sir Thomas More and His 'Utopia.' Out of the con- 
fused and bitter strife of churches and parties, while the 
outcome was still uncertain, issued a great mass of con- 
troversial writing which does not belong to literature. A 
few works, however, more or less directly connected with 
the religious agitation, cannot be passed by. 

One of the most attractive and finest spirits of the reign 
of Henry VIII was Sir Thomas More. A member of the 
Oxford group in its second generation, a close friend of 
Erasmus, his house a center of humanism, he became even 
more conspicuous in public life. A highly successful law- 
yer, he was rapidly advanced by Henry VIII in court and 
in national affairs, until on the fall of Cardinal Wolsey 
in 1529 he was appointed, much against his will, to the 
highest office open to a subject, that of Lord Chancellor 
(head of the judicial system). A devoted Catholic, he 
took a part which must have been revolting to himself in 
the torturing and burning of Protestants; but his abso- 
lute loyalty to conscience showed itself to better purpose 
when in the almost inevitable reverse of fortune he chose 
harsh imprisonment and death rather than to take the 
formal oath of allegiance to the king in opposition to the 
Pope. His quiet jests on the scaffold suggest the never- 
failing sense of humor which was one sign of the com- 
pleteness and perfect poise of his character ; while the hair- 
shirt which he wore throughout his life and the severe 
penances to which he subjected himself reveal strikingly 
how the expression of the deepest convictions of the best 
natures may be determined by inherited and outworn 
modes of thought. 

More's most important work was his 'Utopia,' pub- 
lished in 1516. The name, which is Greek, means No- 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 99 

Place, and the book is one of the most famous of that 
series of attempts to outline an imaginary ideal condition 
of society which begins with Plato's 'Republic' and has 
continued to our own time. 'Utopia,' broadly considered, 
deals primarily with the question which is common to most 
of these books and in which both ancient Greece and Eu- 
rope of the Renaissance took a special interest, namely the 
question of the relation of the State and the individual. 
It consists of two parts. In the first there is a vivid 
picture of the terrible evils which England was suffering 
through war, lawlessness, the wholesale and foolish ap- 
plication of the death penalty, the misery of the peasants, 
the absorption of the land by the rich, and the other 
distressing corruptions in Church and State. In the second 
part, in contrast to all this, a certain imaginary Raphael 
Hythlodaye describes the customs of Utopia, a remote 
island in the New World, to which chance has carried 
him. To some of the ideals thus set forth More can 
scarcely have expected the world ever to attain; and some 
of them will hardly appeal to the majority of readers of 
any period; but in the main he lays down an admirable 
program for human progress, no small part of which has 
been actually realized in the four centuries which have 
since elapsed. 

The controlling purpose in the life of the Utopians is 
to secure both the welfare of the State and the full de- 
velopment of the individual under the ascendancy of his 
higher faculties. The State is democratic, socialistic, and 
communistic, and the will of the individual is subordi- 
nated to the advantage of all, but the real interests of each 
and all are recognized as identical. Every one is obliged 
to work, but not to overwork; six hours a day make the 
allotted period ; and the rest of the time is free, but with 
plentiful provision of lectures and other aids for the edu- 
cation of mind and spirit. All the citizens are taught 
the fundamental art, that of agriculture, and in addition 
each has a particular trade or profession of his own. There 
is no surfeit, excess, or ostentation. Clothing is made for 
durability, and every one's garments are precisely like 
those of every one else, except that there is a difference 
between those of men and women and those of married 
and unmarried persons. The sick are carefully tended, 



100 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

but the victims of hopeless or painful disease are merci- 
fully put to death if they so desire. Crime is naturally 
at a minimum, but those who persist in it are made slaves 
(not executed, for why should the State be deprived of 
their services?). Detesting war, the Utopians make a 
practice of hiring certain barbarians who, conveniently, 
are their neighbors, to do whatever fighting is necessary 
for their defense, and they win if possible, not by the 
revolting slaughter of pitched battles, but by the assassi- 
nation of their enemies' generals. In especial, there is 
complete religious toleration, except for atheism, and ex- 
cept for those who urge their opinions with offensive vio- 
lence. 

' Utopia' was written and published in Latin; among 
the multitude of translations into many languages the 
earliest in English, in which it is often reprinted, is that 
of Ralph Robinson, made in 1551. 

The English Bible and Books of Devotion. To this cen- 
tury of religious change belongs the greater part of the 
literary history of the English Bible and of the ritual books 
of the English Church. Since the suppression of the Wicli- 
fite movement the circulation of the Bible in English had 
been forbidden, but growing Protestantism insistently re- 
vived the demand for it. The attitude of Henry VIII and 
his ministers was inconsistent and uncertain, reflecting 
their own changing points of view. In 1526 William Tyn- 
dale, a zealous Protestant controversialist then in exile in 
Germany, published an excellent English translation of 
the New Testament. Based on the proper authority, the 
Greek original, though with influence from Wiclif and from 
the Latin and German (Luther's) version, this has been 
directly or indirectly the starting-point for all subsequent 
English translations except those of the Catholics. 

Ten years later Tyndale suffered martyrdom, but in 1535 Miles 
Coverdale, later bishop of Exeter, issued in Germany a translation 
of the whole Bible in a more gracious style than Tyndale 's, and to 
this the king and the established clergy were now ready to give 
license and favor. Still two years later appeared a version com- 
pounded of those of Tyndale and Coverdale and called, from the 
fictitious name of its editor, the 'Matthew' Bible. In 1539, under 
the direction of Archbishop Cranmer, Coverdale issued a revised 
edition, officially authorized for use in churches; its version of the 
Psalms still stands as the Psalter of the English Church. In 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 101 

1560 English Puritan refugees at Geneva put forth the ' Geneva 
Bible,' especially accurate as a translation, which long continued 
the accepted version for private use among all parties and for 
all purposes among the Puritans, in both Old and New England. 
Eight years later, under Archbishop Parker, there was issued in 
large volume form and for use in churches the ' Bishops' Bible,' so 
named because the majority of its thirteen editors were bishops. 
This completes the list of important translations down to those 
of 1611 and 1881, of which we shall speak in the proper place. 
The Book of Common Prayer, now used in the English Church co- 
ordinately with Bible and Psalter, took shape out of previous 
primers of private devotion, litanies, and hymns, mainly as the 
work of Archbishop Cranmer during the reign of Edward VI. 

Of the influence of these 'translations of the Bible on 
English literature it is impossible to speak too strongly. 
They rendered the whole nation familiar for centuries with 
one of the grandest and most varied of all collections of 
books, which was adopted with ardent patriotic enthusiasm 
as one of the chief national possessions, and which has 
served as an unfailing storehouse of poetic and dramatic 
allusions for all later writers. Modern English literature 
as a whole is permeated and enriched to an incalculable 
degree with the substance and spirit of the English Bible. 

Wyatt and Surrey and the New Poetry. In the litera- 
ture of fine art also the new beginning was made during 
the reign of Henry VIII. This was through the introduc- 
tion by Sir Thomas Wyatt of the Italian fashion of lyric 
poetry. Wyatt, a man of gentle birth, entered Cambridge 
at the age of twelve and received his degree of M. A. seven 
years later. His mature life was that of a courtier to 
whom the king's favor brought high appointments, with 
such vicissitudes of fortune, including occasional imprison- 
ments, as formed at that time a common part of the cour- 
tier's lot. Wyatt, however, was not a merely worldly per- 
son, but a Protestant seemingly of high and somewhat se- 
vere moral character. He died in 1542 at the age of thirty- 
nine of a fever caught as he was hastening, at the king's 
command, to meet and welcome the Spanish ambassador. 

On one of his missions to the Continent, Wyatt, like 
Chaucer, had visited Italy. Impressed with the beauty of 
Italian verse and the contrasting rudeness of that of con- 
temporary England, he determined to remodel the latter 
in the style of the former. Here a brief historical retro- 



102 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

spect is necessary. The Italian poetry of the sixteenth 
century had itself been originally an imitation, namely of 
the poetry of Provence in Southern France. There, in 
the twelfth century, under a delightful climate and in a 
region of enchanting beauty, had arisen a luxurious civili- 
zation whose poets, the troubadours, many of them men of 
noble birth, had carried to the furthest extreme the woman- 
worship of medieval chivalry and had enshrined it in lyric 
poetry of superb and varied sweetness and beauty. In this 
highly conventionalized poetry the lover is forever sighing 
for his lady, a correspondingly obdurate being whose favor 
is to be won only by years of the most unqualified and un- 
reasoning devotion. From Provence, Italy had taken up 
the style, and among the other forms for its expression, in 
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had devised the poem 
of a single fourteen-line stanza which we call the sonnet. 
The whole movement had found its great master in 
Petrarch, who, in hundreds of poems, mostly sonnets, of 
perfect beauty, had sung the praises and cruelty of his 
nearly imaginary Laura. 

It was this highly artificial but very beautiful poetic 
fashion which Wyatt deliberately set about to introduce 
into England. The nature and success of his innovation 
can be summarized in a few definite statements. 

1. Imitating Petrarch, Wyatt nearly limits himself as 
regards substance to the treatment of the artificial love- 
theme, lamenting the unkindness of ladies who very prob- 
ably never existed and whose favor in any case he prob- 
ably regarded very lightly; yet even so, he often strikes a 
manly English note of independence, declaring that if the 
lady continues obstinate he will not die for her love. 

2. Historically much the most important feature of 
Wyatt 's experiment was the introduction of the sonnet, a 
very substantial service indeed ; for not only did this form, 
like the love-theme, become by far the most popular one 
among English lyric poets of the next two generations, 
setting a fashion which was carried to an astonishing ex- 
cess; but it is the only artificial form of foreign origin 
which has ever been really adopted and naturalized in 
English, and it still remains the best instrument for the 
terse expression of a single poetic thought. Wyatt, it 
should be observed, generally departs from the Petrarch- 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 103 

an rime-scheme, on the whole unfortunately, by substitut- 
ing a third quatrain for the first four lines of the sestet. 
That is, while Petrarch 's rime-arrangement is either abba 
abbacdcdcd, or abb a abb a c d e c d e, Wyatt's 
is usually abbaabbacddcee. 

3. In his attempted reformation of English metrical ir- 
regularity Wyatt, in his sonnets, shows only the uncertain 
hand of a beginner. He generally secures an equal num- 
ber of syllables in each line, but he often merely counts 
them off on his fingers, wrenching the accents all awry, 
and often violently forcing the rimes as well. In his songs, 
however, which are much more numerous than the sonnets, 
he attains delightful fluency and melody. His 'My Lute, 
Awake,' and 'Forget Not Yet' are still counted among 
the notable English lyrics. 

4. A particular and characteristic part of the conven- 
tional Italian lyric apparatus which Wyatt transplanted 
was the 'conceit.' A conceit may be defined as an exag- 
gerated figure of speech or play on words in which intel- 
lectual cleverness figures at least as largely as real emotion 
and which is often dragged out to extremely complicated 
lengths of literal application. An example is Wyatt's 
declaration (after Petrarch) that his love, living in his 
heart, advances to his face and there encamps, displaying 
his banner (which merely means that the lover blushes 
with his emotion). In introducing the conceit Wyatt fa- 
thered the most conspicuous of the superficial general 
features which were to dominate English poetry for a 
century to come. 

5. Still another, minor, innovation of Wyatt was the 
introduction into English verse of the Horatian 'satire' 
(moral poem, reflecting on current follies) in the form of 
three metrical letters to friends. In these the meter is 
the terza rima of Dante. 

Wyatt's work was continued by his poetical disciple and 
successor, Henry Howard, who, as son of the Duke of 
Norfolk, held the courtesy title of Earl of Surrey. A 
brilliant though wilful representative of Tudor chivalry, 
and distinguished in war, Surrey seems to have occupied 
at Court almost the same commanding position as Sir 
Philip Sidney in the following generation. His career 
was cut short in tragically ironical fashion at the age 



104 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of thirty by the plots of his enemies and the dying blood- 
thirstiness of King Henry, which together led to his exe- 
cution on a trumped-up charge of treason. It was only 
one of countless brutal court crimes, but it seems the more 
hateful because if the king had died a single day earlier 
Surrey could have been saved. 

Surrey's services to poetry were two: 1. He improved 
on the versification of Wyatt 's sonnets, securing fluency 
and smoothness. 2. In a translation of two books of 
Vergil's '^Eneid' he introduced, from the Italian, pentam- 
eter blank verse, which was destined thenceforth to be 
the meter of English poetic drama and of much of the 
greatest English non- dramatic poetry. Further, though 
his poems are less numerous than those of Wyatt, his 
range of subjects is somewhat broader, including some 
appreciative treatment of external Nature. He seems, 
however, somewhat less sincere than his teacher. In his 
sonnets he abandoned the form followed by Wyatt and 
adopted (still from the Italian) the one which was sub- 
sequently used by Shakspere, consisting of three inde- 
pendent quatrains followed, as with Wyatt, by a couplet 
which sums up the thought with epigrammatic force, thus : 
ababcdcdefefgg. 

Wyatt and Surrey set a fashion at Court ; for some years 
it seems to have been an almost necessary accomplishment 
for every young noble to turn off love poems after Italian 
and French models; for France too had now taken up 
the fashion. These poems were generally and naturally 
regarded as the property of the Court and of the gentry, 
and circulated at first only in manuscript among the au- 
thor 's friends ; but the general public became curious about 
them, and in 1557 one of the publishers of the day, Richard 
Tottel, securing a number of those of Wyatt, Surrey, and 
a few other noble or gentle authors, published them in a 
little volume, which is known as * Tottel 's Miscellany.' 
Coming as it does in the year before the accession of Queen 
Elizabeth, at the end of the comparatively barren reigns 
of Edward and Mary, this book is taken by common con- 
sent as marking the beginning of the literature of the 
Elizabethan period. It was the premature predecessor, 
also, of a number of such anthologies which were pub- 
lished during the latter half of Elizabeth's reign. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 105 

The Elizabethan Period. * The earlier half of Elizabeth's 
reign, also, though not lacking in literary effort, produced 
no work of permanent importance. After the religious 
convulsions of half a century time was required for the 
development of the internal quiet and confidence from 
which a great literature could spring. At length, how- 
ever, the hour grew ripe and there came the greatest 
outburst of creative energy in the whole history of Eng- 
lish literature. Under Elizabeth's wise guidance the pros- 
perity and enthusiasm of the nation had risen to the 
highest pitch, and London in particular was overflowing 
with vigorous life. A special stimulus of the most intense 
kind came from the struggle with Spain. After a gen- 
eration of half-piratical depredations by the English sea- 
dogs against the Spanish treasure fleets and the Spanish 
settlements in America, King Philip, exasperated beyond 
all patience and urged on by a bigot's zeal for the Catholic 
Church, began deliberately to prepare the Great Armada, 
which was to crush at one blow the insolence, the inde- 
pendence, and the religion of England. There followed 
several long years of breathless suspense; then in 1588 
the Armada sailed and was utterly overwhelmed in one 
of the most complete disasters of the world's history. 
Thereupon the released energy of England broke out ex- 
ultantly into still more impetuous achievement in almost 
every line of activity. The great literary period is taken 
by common consent to begin with the publication of Spen- 
ser's 'Shepherd's Calendar' in 1579, and to end in some 
sense at the death of Elizabeth in 1603, though in the 
drama, at least, it really continues many years longer. 

Several general characteristics of Elizabethan literature 
and writers should be indicated at the outset. 1. The pe- 
riod has the great variety of almost unlimited creative 
force; it includes works of many kinds in both verse and 
prose, and ranges in spirit from the loftiest Platonic 
idealism or the most delightful romance to the level of 
very repulsive realism. 2. It was mainly dominated, 
however, by the spirit of romance (above, pp. 95-96). 3. It 

* Vivid pictures of the Elizabethan period are given in Charles 
Kingsley's 'Westward, ho!' and in Scott's 'Kenilworth.' Scott's 
'The Monastery' and 'The Abbot' deal less successfully with the 
same period in Scotland. 



106 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

was full also of the spirit of dramatic action, as befitted 
an age whose restless enterprise was eagerly extending 
itself to every quarter of the globe. 4. In style it often 
exhibits romantic luxuriance, which sometimes takes the 
form of elaborate affectations of which the favorite 'con- 
ceit' is only the most apparent. 5. It was in part a pe- 
riod of experimentation, when the proper material and 
limits of literary forms were being determined, often- 
times by means of false starts and grandiose failures. In 
particular, many efforts were made to give prolonged 
poetical treatment to many subjects essentially prosaic, 
for example to systems of theological or scientific thought, 
or to the geography of all England. 6. It continued to 
be largely influenced by the literature of Italy, and to a 
less degree by those of France and Spain. 7. The literary 
spirit was all-pervasive, and the authors were men (not 
yet women) of almost every class, from distinguished 
courtiers, like Ralegh and Sidney, to the company of hack 
writers, who starved in garrets and hung about the out- 
skirts of the bustling taverns. 

Prose Fiction. The period saw the beginning, among 
other things, of English prose fiction of something like 
the later modern type. First appeared a series of col- 
lections of short tales chiefly translated from Italian au- 
thors, to which tales the Italian name 'novella' (novel) 
was applied. Most of the separate tales are crude or 
amateurish and have only historical interest, though as 
a class they furnished the plots for many Elizabethan 
dramas, including several of Shakspere's. The most im- 
portant collection was Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure,' in 
1566. The earliest original, or partly original, English 
prose fictions to appear were handbooks of morals and 
manners in story form, and here the beginning was made 
by John Lyly, who is also of some importance in the 
history of the Elizabethan drama. In 1578 Lyly, at the 
age of twenty-five, came from Oxford to London, full of 
the enthusiasm of Renaissance learning, and evidently de- 
termined to fix himself as a new and dazzling star in the 
literary sky. In this ambition he achieved a remarkable 
and immediate success, by the publication of a little book 
entitled 'Euphues and His Anatomie of Wit. ' 'Euphues' 
means 'the well-bred man,' and though there is a slight ac- 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 107 

tion, the work is mainly a series of moralizing disquisi- 
tions (mostly rearranged from Sir Thomas North's trans- 
lation of 'The Dial of Princes' of the Spaniard G-nevara) 
on love, religion, and conduct. Most influential, however, 
for the time-being, was Lyly's style, which is the most 
conspicuous English example of the later Renaissance craze, 
then rampant throughout Western Europe, for refining and 
beautifying the art of prose expression in a mincingly 
affected fashion. Witty, clever, and sparkling at all costs, 
Lyly takes especial pains to balance his sentences and 
clauses antithetically, phrase against phrase and often word 
against word, sometimes emphasizing the balance also by 
an exaggerated use of alliteration and assonance. A 
representative sentence is this: 'Although there be none 
so ignorant that doth not know, neither any so impudent 
that will not confesse, friendship to be the Jewell of 
humaine joye ; yet whosoever shall see this amitie grounded 
upon a little affection, will soone conjecture that it shall 
be dissolved upon a light occasion.' Others of Lyly's 
affectations are rhetorical questions, hosts of allusions to 
classical history and literature, and an unfailing succes- 
sion of similes from all the recondite knowledge that he 
can command, especially from the fantastic collection of 
fables which, coming down through the Middle Ages from 
the Roman writer Pliny, went at that time by the name 
of natural history and which we have already encountered 
in the medieval Bestiaries. Preposterous by any reasonable 
standard, Lyly's style, 'Euphuism,' precisely hit the Court 
taste of his age and became for a decade its most ap- 
proved conversational dialect. 

In literature the imitations of 'Euphues' which 
flourished for a while gave way to a series of romances 
inaugurated by the 'Arcadia' of Sir Philip Sidney. Sid- 
ney's brilliant position for a few years as the noblest 
representative of chivalrous ideals in the intriguing Court 
of Elizabeth is a matter of common fame, as is his death 
in 1586 at the age of thirty-two during the siege of 
Zutphen in Holland. He wrote 'Arcadia' for the amuse- 
ment of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, during a 
period of enforced retirement beginning in 1580, but the 
book was not published until ten years later. It is a 
pastoral romance, in the general style of Italian and Span- 



108 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ish romances of the earlier part of the century. The 
pastoral is the most artificial literary form in modern 
fiction. It may be said to have begun in the third cen- 
tury B. C. with the perfectly sincere poems of the Greek 
Theocritus, who gives genuine expression to the life of 
actual Sicilian shepherds. But with successive Latin, 
Medieval, and Renaissance writers in verse and prose the 
country characters and setting had become mere disguises, 
sometimes allegorical, for the expression of the very far 
from simple sentiments of the upper classes, and some- 
times for their partly genuine longing, the outgrowth 
of sophisticated weariness and ennui, for rural natural- 
ness. Sidney's very complicated tale of adventures in 
love and war, much longer than any of its successors, is 
by no means free from artificiality, but it finely mirrors 
his own knightly spirit and remains a permanent Eng- 
lish classic. Among his followers were some of the better 
hack-writers of the time, who were also among the minor 
dramatists and poets, especially Robert Greene and Thomas 
Lodge. Lodge's 'Rosalynde,' also much influenced by 
Lyly, is in itself a pretty story and is noteworthy as 
the original of Shakspere's 'As You Like It.' 

Lastly, in the concluding decade of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, came a series of realistic stories depicting chiefly, 
in more or less farcical spirit, the life of the poorer classes. 
They belonged mostly to that class of realistic fiction which 
is called picaresque, from the Spanish word 'picaro, ' a 
rogue, because it began in Spain with the 'Lazarillo de 
Tormes' of Diego de Mendoza, in 1553, and because its 
heroes are knavish serving-boys or similar characters 
whose unprincipled tricks and exploits formed the sub- 
stance of the stories. In Elizabethan England it produced 
nothing of individual note. 

Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599. The first really command- 
ing figure in the Elizabethan period, and one of the chief 
of all English poets, is Edmund Spenser.* Born in Lon- 
don in 1552, the son of a clothmaker, Spenser past from 
the newly established Merchant Taylors' school to Pem- 
broke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar, or poor student, and 
during the customary seven years of residence took the 

* His name should never be spelled with a c. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 109 

degrees of B. A. and, in 1576, of M. A. At Cambridge 
he assimilated two of the controlling forces of his life, 
the moderate Puritanism of his college and Platonic ideal- 
ism. Next, after a year or two with his kinspeople in 
Lancashire, in the North of England, he came to London, 
hoping through literature to win high political place, 
and attached himself to the household of Robert Dudley, 
Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's worthless favorite. 
Together with Sidney, who was Leicester's nephew, he 
was for a while a member of a little group of students 
who called themselves 'The Areopagus' and who, like 
occasional other experimenters of the later Renaissance 
period, attempted to make over English versification by 
substituting for rime and accentual meter the Greek and 
Latin system based on exact quantity of syllables. Spenser, 
however, soon outgrew this folly and in 1579 published 
the collection of poems which, as we have already said, is 
commonly taken as marking the beginning of the great 
Elizabethan literary period, namely 'The Shepherd's' 
Calendar.' This is a series of pastoral pieces (eclogues, 
Spenser calls them, by the classical name) twelve in 
number, artificially assigned one to each month in the year. 
The subjects are various — the conventionalized love of the 
poet for a certain Rosalind; current religious controver- 
sies in allegory ;._ moral questions ; the state of poetry in 
England ; and the praises of Queen Elizabeth, whose al- 
most incredible vanity exacted the most fulsome flattery 
from every writer who hoped to win a name at her court. 
The significance of 'The Shepherd's Calendar' lies partly 
in its genuine feeling for external Nature, which con- 
trasts strongly with the hollow conventional phrases of 
the poetry of the previous decade, and especially in the 
vigor, the originality, and, in some of the eclogues, the 
beauty, of the language and of the varied verse. It was 
at once evident that here a real poet had appeared. An 
interesting innovation, diversely judged at the time and 
since, was Spenser's deliberate employment of rustic and 
archaic words, especially of the Northern dialect, which 
he introduced partly because of their appropriateness 
to the imaginary characters, partly for the sake of fresh- 
ness of expression. They, like other features of the work, 



110 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

point forward to 'The Faerie Queene.' 

In the uncertainties of court intrigue literary success 
did not gain for Spenser the political rewards which he 
was seeking, and he was obliged to content himself, the 
next year, with an appointment, which he viewed as sub- 
stantially a sentence of exile, as secretary to Lord Grey, 
the governor of Ireland. In Ireland, therefore, the re- 
maining twenty years of Spenser's short life were for 
the most part spent, amid distressing scenes of English 
oppression and chronic insurrection among the native Irish. 
After various activities during several years Spenser se- 
cured a permanent home in Kilcolman, a fortified tower and 
estate in the southern part of the island, where the ro- 
mantic scenery furnished fit environment for a poet's 
imagination. And Spenser, able all his life to take refuge 
in his art from the crass realities of life, now produced 
many poems, some of them short, but among the others 
the immortal 'Faerie Queene.' The first three books 
of this, his crowning achievement, Spenser, under en- 
thusiastic encouragement from Ralegh, brought to Lon- 
don and published in 1590. The dedication is to Queen 
Elizabeth, to whom, indeed, as its heroine, the poem pays 
perhaps the most splendid compliment ever offered to 
any human being in verse. She responded with an uncer- 
tain pension of £50 (equivalent to perhaps $1500 at the 
present time), but not with the gift of political prefer- 
ment which was still Spenser's hope; and in some bitter- 
ness of spirit he retired to Ireland, where in satirical 
poems he proceeded to attack the vanity of the world 
and the fickleness of men. His courtship and, in 1594, his 
marriage produced his sonnet sequence, called 'Amoretti' 
(Italian for 'Love-poems'), and his ' Epithalamium, ' the 
most magnificent of marriage hymns in English and prob- 
ably in world-literature; though his ' Prothalamium, ' in 
honor of the marriage of two noble sisters, is a near 
rival to it. 

Spenser, a zealous Protestant as well as a fine-spirited 
idealist, was in entire sympathy with Lord Grey's policy 
of stern repression of the Catholic Irish, to whom, there- 
fore, he must have appeared merely as one of the hated 
crew of their pitiless tyrants. In 1598 he was appointed 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 111 

sheriff of the county of Cork • but a rebellion which broke 
out proved too strong for . him, and he and his family 
barely escaped from the sack and destruction of his tower. 
He was sent with despatches to the English Court and died 
in London in January, 1599, no doubt in part as a result 
of the hardships that he had suffered. He was buried in 
Westminster Abbey. 

Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' is not only one of the longest 
but one of the greatest of English poems; it is also very 
characteristically Elizabethan. To deal with so delicate a 
thing by the method of mechanical analysis seems scarcely 
less than profanation, but accurate criticism can proceed in 
no other way. 

1. Sources and Plan. Few poems more clearly illus- 
trate the variety of influences from which most great 
literary works result. In many respects the most direct 
source was the body of Italian romances of chivalry, 
especially the 'Orlando Furioso' of Ariosto, which was 
written in the early part of the sixteenth century. These 
romances, in turn, combine the personages of the medieval 
French epics of Charlemagne with something of the spirit 
of Arthurian romance and with a Renaissance atmosphere 
of magic and of rich fantastic beauty. Spenser borrows 
and absorbs all these things and moreover he imitates 
Ariosto closely, often merely translating whole passages 
from his work. But this use of the Italian romances, 
further, carries with it a large employment of characters, 
incidents, ancLimagery from 'classical mythology and liter- 
ature, among other things the elaborated similes of the 
classical epics. Spenser himself is directly influenced, also, 
by the medieval romances. ' Most important of all, all 
these elements are shaped 4 to the purpose of the poem 
by Spenser 's high moral aim, which in turn springs largely 
from his Platonic idealism. 

What the plan of the poem is Spenser explains in a 
prefatory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. The whole is a 
vast ^e rjic__allegory, aiming, in the first place, to jaortray 
the virtues which make up the character of a perfect 
knight; an ideal embodiment, seen. through Renaissance 
conceptions, of the best in the chivalrous system which 
in Spenser's time had passed away, but to which some 
choice spirits still looked back with regretful admira- 



112 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tion. As Spenser intended, twelve moral virtues of the 
individual character, such as Holiness and Temperance, 
were to be presented, each personified in the hero of one 
of twelve Books; and the crowning virtue, which Spenser, 
in Rennaissance terms, called Magnificence, and which 
may be interpreted as Magnanimity, was to figure as Prince 
(King) Arthur, nominally the central hero of the whole 
poem, appearing and disappearing at frequent intervals. 
Spenser states in his prefatory letter that if he shall carry 
this first projected labor to a successful end he may con- 
tinue it in still twelve other Books, similarly allegorizing 
twelve political virtues. The allegorical form, we should 
hardly need to be reminded, is another heritage from me- 
dieval literature, but the effort to shape a perfect char- 
acter, completely equipped to serve the State, was char- 
acteristically of the Platonizing Renaissance. That the 
reader may never be in danger of forgetting his moral 
aim, Spenser fills the poem with moral observations, fre- 
quently setting them as guides at the beginning of the 
cantos. 

2. -The Allegory. Lack of Unity. So complex and vast 
a plan could scarcely have been worked out by any human 
genius in a perfect and clear unity, and besides this, 
Spenser, with all his high endowments, was decidedly weak 
in constructive skill. The allegory, at the outset, even 
in Spenser's own statement, is confused and hazy. For 
beyond the primary moral interpretation, Spenser applies 
it in various secondary or parallel ways. In the widest m 
sense, the entire struggle between the good and evil char- 
acters is to be taken as figuring forth the warfare both 
in the individual soul and in the world at large between 
Righteousness and Sin; and in somewhat narrower senses, 
between Protestantism and Catholicism, and between Eng- 
land and Spain. In some places, also, it represents other 
events and aspects of European politics. Many of the 
single persons of the story, entering into each of these 
overlapping interpretations, bear double or triple roles. 
Gloriana, the Fairy Queen, is abstractly Glory, but hu- 
manly she is Queen Elizabeth; and from other points of 
view Elizabeth is identified with several of the lesser 
heroines. So likewise the witch Duessa is both Papal 
Falsehood and Mary Queen of Scots; Prince Arthur both 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 113 

Magnificence and (with sorry inappropriateness) the Earl 
of Leicester ; and others of the characters stand with more 
or less consistency for such actual persons as Philip II of 
Spain, Henry IV of France, and Spenser's chief, Lord 
Grey. In fact, in Renaissance spirit, and following Sid- 
ney's ' Defense of Poesie,' Spenser attempts to harmonize 
history, philosophy, ethics, and politics, subordinating them 
all to the art of poetry. The plan is grand but im- 
practicable, and except for the original moral interpreta- 
tion, to which in the earlier books the incidents are skil- 
fully adapted, it is fruitless as one reads to undertake to 
follow the allegories. Many readers are able, no doubt, 
merely to disregard them, but there are others, like Lowell, 
to whom the moral,. 'when they come suddenly upon it, 
gives a shock of unpleasant surprise, as when in eating 
strawberries one's teeth encounter grit.' 

The same lack of unity pervades the external story. The 
first Book begins abruptly, in the middle; and for clear- 
ness' sake Spenser had been obliged to explain in his 
prefatory letter that the real commencement must be 
supposed to be a scene like those of Arthurian romance, 
at the court and annual feast of the Fairy Queen, where 
twelve adventures had been assigned to as many knights. 
Spenser strangely planned to narrate this beginning of the 
whole in his final Book, but even if it had been properly 
placed at the outset it would have served only as a loose 
enveloping action for a series of stories essentially as 
distinct as those in Malory. More serious, perhaps, is the 
lack of unity within the single books. Spenser's genius 
was never for strongly condensed narrative, and following 
his Italian originals, though with less firmness, he wove 
his story as a tangled web of intermingled adventures, with 
almost endless elaboration and digression. Incident after 
incident is broken off and later resumed and episode after 
episode is introduced, until the reader almost abandons 
any effort to trace the main design. A part of the con- 
fusion is due to the mechanical plan. Each Book con- 
sists of twelve cantos (of from forty to ninety stanzas 
each) and oftentimes Spenser has difficulty in filling out 
the scheme. No one, certainly, can regret that he actually 
completed only a quarter of his projected work. In the 
six existing Books he has given almost exhaustive ex- 



114 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

pression to a richly creative imagination, and additional 
prolongation would have done little but to repeat. 

Still further, the characteristic Renaissance lack of cer- 
tainty as to the proper materials for poetry is sometimes 
responsible for a rudely inharmonious element in the other- 
wise delightful romantic atmosphere. For a single illus- 
tration, the description of the House of Alma in Book II, 
Canto Nine, is a tediously literal medieval allegory of the 
Soul and Body; and occasional realistic details here and 
there in the poem at large are merely repellent to more 
modern taste. 

3. The Lack of Dramatic Reality. A romantic allegory 
like 'The Faerie Queene' does not aim at intense lifelike- 
ness — a certain remoteness from the . actual is one of its, 
chief attractions. But sometimes in Spenser's poem the 
reader feels too wide a divorce from reality. Part of this 
fault is ascribable to the use of magic, to which there is 
repeated but inconsistent resort, especially, as in the me- 
dieval romances, for the protection of the good characters. 
Oftentimes, indeed, by the persistent loading of the dice 
against the villains and scapegoats, the reader's sym- 
pathy is half aroused in their behalf. Thus in the fight of 
the Red Cross Knight with his special enemy, the dragon, 
where, of course, the Knight must be victorious, it is evi- 
dent that without the author's help the dragon is incom- 
parably the stronger. Once, swooping down on the Knight, 
he seizes him in his talons (whose least touch was else- 
where said to be fatal) and bears him aloft into the air. 
The valor of the Knight compels him to relax his hold, 
but instead of merely dropping the Knight to certain death, 
he carefully flies back to earth and sets him down in safety. 
More definite regard to the actual laws of life would have 
given the poem greater firmness without the sacrifice of any 
of its charm. 

4. The Romantic Beauty. General Atmosphere and De- 
scription. Critical sincerity has required us to dwell thus 
long on the defects of the poem; but once recognized we 
should dismiss them altogether from mind and turn at- 
tention to the far more important beauties. The great 
qualities of 'The Faerie Queene' are suggested by the 
title, 'The Poets' Poet,' which Charles Lamb, with happy 
inspiration, applied to Spenser. Most of all are we in- 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 115 

debted to Spenser's high idealism. No poem in the world 
is nobler than 'The Faerie Queene' in atmosphere and 
entire effect. Spenser himself is always the perfect gen- 
tleman of his own imagination, and in his company we 
are secure from the intrusion of anything morally base or 
mean. But in him, also, moral beauty is in full harmony 
with the beauty of art and the senses. Spenser was a 
Puritan, but a Puritan of the earlier English Renais- 
sance, to whom the foes of righteousness were also the 
foes of external loveliness. Of the three fierce Saracen 
brother-knights who repeatedly appear in the service of 
Evil, two are Sansloy, the enemy of law, and Sansfoy, 
the enemy of religion, but the third is Sans joy, enemy of 
pleasure. And of external beauty there has never been 
a more gifted lover than Spenser. We often feel, with 
Lowell, that 'he is the pure sense of the beautiful incar- 
nated.' The poem is a romantically luxuriant wilderness 
of dreamily or languorously delightful visions, often rich 
with all the harmonies of form and motion and color 
and sound. As Lowell says, 'The true use of Spenser is 
as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes 
us, and where we spend an hour or two, long enough to 
sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them.' 
His landscapes, to speak of one particular feature, are usu- 
ally of a rather vague, often of a vast nature, as suits 
the unreality of his poetic world, and usually, since Spenser 
was not a minute observer, follow the conventions of 
Renaissance literature. They are commonly great plains, 
wide and gloomy forests (where the trees of many climates 
often grow together in impossible harmony), cool caves — 
in general, lonely, quiet, or soothing scenes, but all un- 
questionable portions of a delightful fairyland. To him, 
it should be added, as to most men before modern Science 
had subdued the world to human uses, the sublime aspects 
of Nature were mainly dreadful; the ocean, for example, 
seemed to him a raging 'waste of waters, wide and deep,' a 
mysterious and insatiate devourer of the lives of men. 

To the beauty of Spenser's imagination, ideal and sensu- 
ous, corresponds his magnificent command of rhythm and 
of sound. As a verbal melodist, especially a melodist of 
sweetness and of stately grace, and as a harmonist of pro- 
longed and complex cadences, he is unsurpassable. But 



116 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

he has full command of his rhythm according to the sub- 
ject, and can range from the most delicate suggestion of 
airy beauty to the roar of the tempest or the strident 
energy of battle. In vocabulary and phraseology his 
fluency appears inexhaustible. Here, as in ' The Shepherd's 
Calendar/ he deliberately introduces, especially from 
Chaucer, obsolete words and forms, such as the inflectional 
ending in -en, which distinctly contribute to his romantic 
effect. His constant use of alliteration is very skilful; the 
frequency of the alliteration on w is conspicuous but ap- 
parently accidental. 

5. The Spenserian Stanza. For the external medium of 
all this beauty Spenser, modifying the ottava rima of 
Ariosto (a stanza which rimes abababcc), invented the 
stanza which bears his own name and which is the only 
artificial stanza of English origin that has ever passed into 
currency.* The rime-scheme is ababbcbcc, and in the last 
line the iambic pentameter gives place to an Alexandrine 
(an iambic hexameter) . Whether or not any stanza form is 
as well adapted as blank verse or the rimed couplet for 
prolonged narrative is an interesting question, but there 
can be no doubt that Spenser's stanza, firmly unified, in 
spite of its length, by its central couplet and by the finality 
of the last line, is a discovery of genius, and that the 
Alexandrine, 'forever feeling for the next stanza,' does 
much to bind the stanzas together. It has been adopted in 
no small number of the greatest subsequent English poems, 
including such various ones as Burns' 'Cotter's Saturday 
Night,' Byron's 'Childe Harold,,' Keats' 'Eve of St. 
Agnes,' and Shelley's 'Adonais. ' 

In general style and spirit, it should be added, Spenser 1 
has been one of the most powerful influences on all suc- 
ceeding English romantic poetry. Two further sentences 
of Lowell well summarize his whole general achievement: 
'His great merit is in the ideal treatment with which he 
glorified common things and gilded them with a ray of 
enthusiasm. He is a standing protest against the tyranny 
of the Commonplace, and sows the seeds of a noble dis- 
content with prosaic views of life and the dull uses to 

* Note that this is not inconsistent with what is said above,, 
p. 102, of the sonnet. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 117 

which it may be put.' 

Elizabethan Lyric Poetry. 'The Faerie Queene' is the 
only long Elizabethan poem of the very highest rank, but 
Spenser, as we have seen, is almost equally conspicuous 
as a lyric poet. In that respect he was one among a 
throng of melodists who made the Elizabethan age in many 
respects the greatest lyric period in the history of English 
or perhaps of any literature. Still grander, to be sure, by 
the nature of the two forms, was the Elizabethan achieve- 
ment in the drama, which we shall consider in the next 
chapter; but the lyrics have the advantage in sheer de- 
lightfulness and, of course, in rapid and direct appeal. 

The zest for lyric poetry somewhat artificially inaugu- 
rated at Court by Wyatt and Surrey seems to have largely 
subsided, like any other fad, after some years, but it 
vigorously revived, in much more genuine fashion, with the 
taste for other imaginative forms of literature, in the last 
two decades of Elizabeth's reign. It revived, too, not only 
among the courtiers but among all classes; in no other 
form of literature was the diversity of authors so marked ; 
almost every writer of the period who was not purely a 
man of prose seems to have been gifted with the lyric 
power. 

The qualities which especially distinguish the Eliza-] 
bethan lyrics are fluency, sweetness, melody, and an en-j 
thusiastic joy in life, all spontaneous, direct, and exquisite. 
Uniting the genuineness of the popular ballad with the 
finer sense of conscious artistic poetry, these poems possess 
a charm different, though in an only half definable way, 
from that of any other lyrics. In subjects they display the 
usual lyric variety. There are songs of delight in Nature; 
a multitude of love poems of all moods ; many pastorals, in 
which, generally, the pastoral conventions sit lightly on 
the genuine poetical feeling ^occasional patriotic outbursts; 
and some reflective and religious poems. In stanza struc- 
ture the number of forms is unusually great, but in most 
cases stanzas are internally varied and have a large admix- 
ture of short, ringing or musing, lines. The lyrics were 
published sometimes in collections by single authors, some- 
times in the series of anthologies which succeeded to 
Tottel's 'Miscellany.' Some of these anthologies were 
books of songs with the accompanying music; for music, 



118 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

brought with all the other cultural influences from Italy 
and France, was now enthusiastically cultivated, and the 
soft melody of many of the best Elizabethan lyrics is that 
of accomplished composers. Many of the lyrics, again, are 
included as songs in the dramas of the time; and Shak- 
spere's comedies show him nearly as preeminent among 
the lyric poets as among the playwrights. 

Some of the finest of the lyrics are anonymous. Among the best 
of the known poets are these: George Gascoigne (about 1530-1577), 
a courtier and soldier, who bridges the gap between Surrey and 
Sidney; Sir Edward Dyer (about 1545-1607), a scholar and states- 
man, author of one perfect lyric, 'My mind to me a kingdom is'; 
John Lyly (1553-1606), the Euphuist and dramatist; Nicholas Bre- 
ton (about 1545 to about 1626), a prolific writer in verse and prose 
and one of the most successful poets of the pastoral style; Eobert 
Southwell (about 1562-1595), a Jesuit intriguer of ardent piety, 
finally imprisoned, tortured, and executed as a traitor; George 
Peele (1558 to about 1598), the dramatist; Thomas Lodge (about 
1558-1625), poet, novelist, and physician; Christopher Marlowe 
(1564-1593), the dramatist; Thomas Nash (1567-1601), one of the 
most prolific Elizabethan hack writers; Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), 
scholar and critic, member in his later years of the royal house- 
hold of James I; Barnabe Barnes (about 1569-1609); Richard Barn- 
field (1574-1627); Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618), courtier, states- 
man, explorer, and scholar; Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618), linguist 
and merchant, known for his translation of the long religious poems 
of the Frenchman Du Bartas, through which he exercised an influ- 
ence on Milton; Francis Davison (about 1575 to about 1619), son 
of a counsellor of Queen Elizabeth, a lawyer; and Thomas Dekker 
(about 1570 to about 1640), a ne'er-do-weel dramatist and hack- 
writer of irrepressible and delightful good spirits. 

The Sonnets. In the last decade, especially, of the cen- 
tury, no other lyric form compared in popularity with 
the sonnet. Here England was still following in the foot- 
steps of Italy and France; it has been estimated that in 
the course of the century over three hundred thousand 
sonnets were written in Western Europe. In England as 
elsewhere most of these poems were inevitably of mediocre 
quality and imitative in substance, ringing the changes 
with wearisome iteration on a minimum of ideas, often 
with the most extravagant use of conceits. Petrarch's 
example was still commonly followed; the sonnets, were 
generally composed in sequences (cycles) of a hundred or 
more, addressed to the poet's more or less imaginary cruel 
lady, though the note of manly independence introduced 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTUEY 119 

by Wyatt is frequent. First of the important English 
sequences is the 'Astrophel and Stella' of Sir Philip Sid- 
ney, written about 1580, published in 1591. 'Astrophel' 
is a fanciful half-Greek anagram for the poet's own name, 
and Stella (Star) designates Lady Penelope Devereux, 
who at about this time married Lord Rich. The sequence 
may very reasonably be interpreted as an expression of 
Platonic idealism, though it is sometimes taken in a sense 
less consistent with Sidney 's high reputation. Of Spenser 's 
' Amoretti ' we have already spoken. By far the finest of all 
the sonnets are the best ones (a considerable part) of 
Shakspere's one hundred and fifty-four, which were not 
published until 1609 but may have been mostly written be- 
fore 1600. Their interpretation has long been hotly de- 
bated. It is certain, however, that they do not form a 
connected sequence. Some of them are occupied with urg- 
ing a youth of high rank, Shakspere's patron, who may 
have been either the Earl of Southampton or "William Her- 
bert, Earl of Pembroke, to marry and perpetuate his race ; 
others hint the story, real or imaginary, of Shakspere 's in- 
fatuation for a 'dark lady,' leading to bitter disillusion; 
and still others seem to be occasional expressions of devo- 
tion to other friends of one or the other sex. Here as else- 
where Shakspere's genius, at its best, is supreme over all 
rivals; the first recorded criticism speaks of the 'sugared 
sweetness' of his sonnets; but his genius is not always at 
its best. 

John Donne and the Beginning of the 'Metaphysical' 
Poetry. The last decade of the sixteenth century presents 
also, in the poems of John Donne,* a new and very strange 
style of verse. Donne, born in 1573, possessed one of the 
keenest and most powerful intellects of the time, but his 
early manhood was largely wasted in dissipation, though 
he studied theology and law and seems to have seen military 
service. It was during this period that he wrote his love 
poems. Then, while living with his wife and children 
in uncertain dependence on noble patrons, he turned to 
religious poetry. At last he entered the Church, became 
famous as one of the most eloquent preachers of the time, 
and through the favor of King James was rapidly pro- 

* Pronounced Dun. 



120 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

moted until he was made Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. He 
died in 1631 after having furnished a striking instance 
of the fantastic morbidness of the period (post-Eliza- 
bethan) by having his picture painted as he stood wrapped 
in his shroud on a funeral urn. 

The distinguishing general characteristic of Donne's 
poetry is the remarkable combination of an aggressive in- 
tellectuality with the lyric form and spirit. Whether true 
poetry or mere intellectual cleverness is the predominant 
element may reasonably be questioned; but on many 
readers Donne 's verse exercises a unique attraction. Its 
definite peculiarities are outstanding: 1. By a process 
of extreme exaggeration and minute elaboration Donne 
carries the Elizabethan conceits almost to the farthest pos- 
sible limit, achieving what Samuel Johnson two centuries 
later described as 'enormous and disgusting hyperboles.' 
2. In so doing he makes relentless use of the intellect and 
of verbally precise but actually preposterous logic, strik- 
ing out astonishingly brilliant but utterly fantastic flashes 
of wit. 3. He draws the material of his figures of speech 
from highly unpoetical sources — partly from the activities 
of every-day life, but especially from all the sciences and 
school-knowledge of the time. The material is abstract^, 
but Donne gives it full poetic concrete picturesqueness. 
Thus he speaks of one spirit overtaking another at death 
as one bullet shot out of a gun may overtake another which 
has lesser velocity but was earlier discharged. It was be- 
cause of these last two characteristics that Dr. Johnson ap- 
plied to Donne and his followers the rather clumsy name of 
'Metaphysical' (Philosophical) poets. 'Fantastic' would 
have been a better word. 4. In vigorous reaction against 
the sometimes nerveless melody of most contemporary 
poets Donne often makes his verse as ruggedly condensed 
(often as obscure) and as harsh as possible. Its wrenched 
accents and slurred syllables sometimes appear absolutely 
unmetrical, but it seems that Donne generally followed 
subtle rhythmical ideas of his own. He adds to the ap- 
pearance of irregularity by experimenting with a large 
number of lyric stanza forms — a different form, in fact, 
for nearly every poem. 5. In his love poems, while his 
sentiment is often Petrarchan, he often emphasizes also 
the English note of independence, taking as a favorite 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 121 

theme the incredible fickleness of woman. 

In spirit Donne belongs much less to Elizabethan poetry 
than to the following period, in which nearly half his life 
fell. Of his great influence on the poetry of that period 
we shall speak in the proper place. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 

The Influence of Classical Comedy and Tragedy. In 

Chapter IV we left the drama at that point, toward the 
middle of the sixteenth century, when the Mystery Plays 
had largely declined and Moralities and Interlude-Farces, 
themselves decadent, were sharing in rather confused 
rivalry that degree of popular interest which remained 
unabsorbed by the religious, political, and social ferment. 
There was still to be a period of thirty or forty years 
before the flowering of the great Elizabethan drama, but 
they were to be years of new, if uncertain, beginnings. 

The first new formative force was the influence of the 
classical drama, for which, with other things classical, the 
Renaissance had aroused enthusiasm. This force operated 
mainly not through writers for popular audiences, like 
the authors of most Moralities and Interludes, but through 
men of the schools and the universities, writing for per- 
formances in their own circles or in that of the Court. In 
had now become a not uncommon thing for boys at the 
large schools to act in regular dramatic fashion, at first 
in Latin, afterward in English translation, some of the 
plays of the Latin comedians which had long formed a 
part of the school curriculum. Shortly after the middle 
of the century, probably, the head-master of Westminister 
School, Nicholas Udall, took the further step of writing 
for his boys on the classical model an original farce- 
comedy, the amusing 'Ralph Roister Doister.' This play 
is so close a copy of Plautus' 'Miles Gloriosus' and 
Terence's 'Eunuchus' that there is little that is really 
English about it; a much larger element of local realism 
of the traditional English sort, in a classical framework, 
was presented in the coarse but really skillful 'Gammer 
Gurton's Needle,' which was probably written at about 
the same time, apparently by the Cambridge student Wil- 
liam Stevenson. 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 123 

Meanwhile students at the universities, also, had been 
acting Plautus and Terence, and further, had been writ- 
ing and acting Latin tragedies, as well as comedies, of 
their own composition. Their chief models for tragedy 
were the plays of the first-century Roman Seneca, who 
may or may not have been identical with the philosopher 
who was the tutor of the Emperor Nero. Both through 
these university imitations and directly, Seneca's very 
faulty plays continued for many years to exercise a great 
influence on English tragedy. Falling far short of the 
noble spirit of Greek tragedy, which they in turn attempt 
to copy, Seneca's plays do observe its mechanical conven- 
tions, especially the unities of Action and Time, the use of 
the chorus to comment on the action, the avoidance of vio- 
lent action and deaths on the stage, and the use of mes- 
sengers to report such events. For proper dramatic action 
they largely substitute ranting moralizing declamation, 
with crudely exaggerated passion, and they exhibit a great 
vein of melodramatic horror, for instance in the frequent 
use of the motive of implacable revenge for murder and of 
a ghost who incites to it. In the early Elizabethan period, 
however, an age when life itself was dramatically intense 
and tragic, when everything classic was looked on with 
reverence, and when standards of taste were unformed, 
it was natural enough that such plays should pass for 
masterpieces. 

A direct imitation of Seneca, famous as the first tragedy 
in English on classical lines, was the ' Gorboduc, or Ferrex 
and Porrex, ' of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, acted 
in 1562. Its story, like those of some of Shakspere's plays 
later, goes back ultimately to the account of one of the 
early reigns in Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'History.' ' Gor- 
boduc' outdoes its Senecan models in tedious moralizing, 
and is painfully wooden in all respects; but it has real 
importance not only because it is the first regular English 
tragedy, but because it was the first play to use the iambic 
pentameter blank verse which Surrey had introduced to 
English poetry and which was destined to be the verse-form 
of really great English tragedy. When they wrote the 
play Norton and Sackville were law students at the Inner 
Temple, and from other law students during the following 
years came other plays, which were generally acted at 



124 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

festival seasons, such as Christmas, at the lawyers' col- 
leges, or before the Queen, though the common people 
were also admitted among the audience. Unlike 'Gor- 
boduc,' these other university plays were not only for 
the most part crude and coarse in the same manner as 
earlier English plays, but in accordance also with the 
native English tradition and in violent defiance of the 
classical principle of Unity, they generally combined trag- 
ical classical stories with realistic scenes of English comedy 
(somewhat later with Italian stories). Nevertheless, and 
this is the main thing, the more thoughtful members of 
the Court and University circles were now learning from 
the study of classical plays a sense for form and the 
fundamental distinction between tragedy and comedy. 

The Chronicle-History Play. About twenty years be- 
fore the end of the century there began to appear, at 
first at the Court and the Universities, later on the popular 
stage, a form of play which was to hold, along with 
tragedy and comedy, an important place in the great 
decades that were to follow, namely the Chronicle-History 
Play. This form of play generally presented the chief 
events in the whole or a part of the reign of some Eng- 
lish king. It was largely a product of the pride which 
was being awakened among the people in the greatness 
of England under Elizabeth, and of the consequent desire 
to know something of the past history of the country, and 
it received a great impulse from the enthusiasm aroused 
by the struggle with Spain and the defeat of the Armada. 
It was not, however, altogether a new creation, for its 
method was similar to that of the university plays which 
dealt with monarchs of classical history. It partly in- 
herited from them the formless mixture of farcical humor 
with historical or supposedly historical fact which it shared 
with other plays of the time, and sometimes also an un- 
usually reckless disregard of unity of action, time, and 
place. Since its main serious purpose, when it had one, 
was to convey information, the other chief dramatic prin- 
ciples, such as careful presentation of a few main char- 
acters and of a universally significant human struggle, 
were also generally disregarded. It was only in the hands 
of Shakspere that the species was to be moulded into 
true dramatic form and to attain real greatness; and after 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 125 

a quarter century of popularity it was to be reabsorbed 
into tragedy, of which in fact it was always only a 
special variety. 

John Lyly. The first Elizabethan dramatist of perma- 
nent individual importance is the comedian John Lyly, of 
whose early success at Court with the artificial romance 
'Euphues' we have already spoken. From 'Euphues' Lyly 
turned to the still more promising work of writing com- 
edies for the Court entertainments with which Queen 
Elizabeth was extremely lavish. The character of Lyly's 
plays was largely determined by the light and spec- 
tacular nature of these entertainments, and further by 
the fact that on most occasions the players at Court were 
boys. These were primarily the 'children [choir-boys] 
of the Queen's Chapel,' who for some generations had been 
sought out from all parts of England for their good 
voices and were very carefully trained for singing and 
for dramatic performances. The choir-boys of St. Paul's 
Cathedral, similarly trained, also often acted before the 
Queen. Many of the plays given by these boys were of 
the ordinary sorts, but it is evident that they would be 
most successful in dainty comedies especially adapted to 
their boyish capacity. Such comedies Lyly proceeded to 
write, in prose. The subjects are from classical mythol- 
ogy or history or English folk-lore, into which Lyly some- 
times weaves an allegorical presentation of court intrigue. 
The plots are very slight, and though the structure is 
decidedly better than in most previous plays, the humor- 
ous sub-actions sometimes have little connection with the 
main action. Characterization is still rudimentary, and 
altogether the plays present not so much a picture of 
reality as 'a faint moonlight reflection of life.' None 
the less the best of them, such as 'Alexander and Cam- 
paspe, ' are delightful in their sparkling delicacy, which 
is produced partly by the carefully-wrought style, similar 
to that of 'Euphues,' but less artificial, and is enhanced 
by the charming lyrics which are scattered through them. 
For all this the elaborate scenery and costuming of the 
Court entertainments provided a very harmonious back- 
ground. 

These plays were to exert a strong influence on Shak- 
spere's early comedies, probably suggesting to him: the 



126 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

use of prose for comedy; the value of snappy and witty 
dialog; refinement, as well as affectation, of style; lyric 
atmosphere; the characters and tone of high comedy, con- 
trasting so favorably with the usual coarse farce of the 
period; and further such details as the employment of 
impudent boy-pages as a source of amusement. 

Peele, Greene, and Kyd. Of the most important 
early contemporaries of Shakspere we have already men- 
tioned two as noteworthy in other fields of literature. 
George Peele 's masque-like 'Arraignment of Paris' helps 
to show him as more a lyric poet than a dramatist. Robert 
Greene's plays, especially 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bun- 
gay,' reveal, like his novels, some real, though not very 
elaborate, power of characterization. They are especially 
important in developing the theme of romantic love with 
real fineness of feeling and thus helping to prepare the 
way for Shakspere in a very important particular. In 
marked contrast to these men is Thomas Kyd, who about 
the year 1590 attained a meteoric reputation with crude 
'tragedies of blood,' specialized descendants of Senecan 
tragedy, one of which may have been the early play on 
Hamlet which Shakspere used as the groundwork for 
his masterpiece. 

Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593. Peele and Greene were 
University men who wrote partly for Court or academic 
audiences, partly for the popular stage. The distinction 
between the two sorts of drama was still further broken 
down in the work of Christopher Marlowe, a poet of real 
genius, decidedly the chief dramatist among Shakspere 's 
early contemporaries, and the one from whom Shakspere 
learned the most. 

Marlowe was born in 1564 (the same year as Shak- 
spere), the son of a shoemaker at Canterbury. Taking 
his master's degree after seven years at Cambridge, in 
1587, he followed the other 'university wits' to London. 
There, probably the same year and the next, he aston- 
ished the public with the two parts of 'Tamburlaine the 
Great,' a dramatization of the stupendous career of the 
bloodthirsty Mongol fourteenth-century conqueror. These 
plays, in spite of faults now conspicuous enough, are splen- 
didly imaginative and poetic, and were by far the most 
powerful that had yet been written in England. Marlowe 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 127 

followed them with ' The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, ' 
a treatment of the medieval story which two hundred years 
later was to serve Goethe for his masterpiece; with 'The 
Jew of Malta/ which was to give Shakspere suggestions 
for 'The Merchant of Venice'; and with 'Edward the 
Second,' the first really artistic Chronicle History play. 
Among the literary adventurers of the age who led wild 
lives in the London taverns Marlowe is said to have at- 
tained a conspicuous reputation for violence and irre- 
ligion. He was killed in 1593 in a reckless and foolish 
brawl, before he had reached the age of thirty. 

If Marlowe's life was unworthy, the fault must be 
laid rather at the door of circumstances than of his own 
genuine nature. His plays show him to have been an 
ardent idealist and a representative of many of the qual- 
ities that made the greatness of the Renaissance. The 
Renaissance learning, the apparently boundless vistas 
which it had opened to the human spirit, and the con- 
sciousness of his own power, evidently intoxicated Mar- 
lowe with a vast ambition to achieve results which in his 
youthful inexperience he could scarcely even picture to 
himself. His spirit, cramped and outraged by the im- 
passable limitations of human life and by the conventions 
of society, beat recklessly against them with an impatience 
fruitless but partly grand. This is the underlying spirit 
of almost all his plays, struggling in them- for expression. 
The Prolog to 'Tamburlaine' makes pretentious announce- 
ment that the author will discard the usual buffoonery of 
the popular stage and will set a new standard of tragic 
majesty: 

From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, 
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, 
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, 
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine 
Threatening the world with high astounding terms, 
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. 

Tamburlaine himself as Marlowe presents him is a 
titanic, almost superhuman, figure who by sheer courage 
and pitiless unbending will raises himself from shepherd to 
general and then emperor of countless peoples, and sweeps 
like a whirlwind over the stage of the world, carrying 



128 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

everywhere overwhelming slaughter and desolation. His 
speeches are outbursts of incredible arrogance, equally pow- 
erful and bombastic. Indeed his blasphemous boasts of 
superiority to the gods seem almost justified by his ap- 
parently irresistible success. But at the end he learns 
that the laws of life are inexorable even for him; all his 
indignant rage cannot redeem his son from cowardice, or 
save his wife from death, or delay his own end. As has 
been said,* ' Tamburlaine ' expresses with 'a profound, 
lasting, noble sense and in grandly symbolic terms, the 
eternal tragedy inherent in the conflict between human 
aspiration and human power.' 

For several other reasons 'Tamburlaine' is of high im- 
portance. It gives repeated and splendid expression to 
the passionate haunting Renaissance zest for the beauti- 
ful. It is rich with extravagant sensuous descriptions, 
notable among those which abound gorgeously in all Eliza- 
bethan poetry. But finest of all is the description of beauty 
by its effects which Marlowe puts into the mouth of 
Faustus at the sight of Helen of Troy : 

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? 

Much of Marlowe's strength, again, lies in his power- 
ful and beautiful use of blank verse. First among the 
dramatists of the popular stage he discarded rime, and 
taking and vitalizing the stiff pentameter line of 'Gor- 
boduc, ' gave it an immediate and lasting vogue for tragedy 
and high comedy. Marlowe, virtually a beginner, could 
not be expected to carry blank verse to that perfection 
which his success made possible for Shakspere ; he did not 
altogether escape monotony and commonplaceness ; but he 
gained a high degree of flexibility and beauty by avoiding 
a regularly end-stopped arrangement, by taking pains to 
secure variety of pause and accent, and by giving his lan- 
guage poetic condensation and suggestiveness. His work- 
manship thoroughly justifies the characterization 'Mar- 
lowe's mighty line,' which Ben Jonson in his tribute to 
Shakspere bestowed on it long after Marlowe's death. 

The greatest significance of 'Tamburlaine,' lastly, lies in 

* Professor Barrett Wendell, 'William Shakspere,' p. 36. 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 129 

the fact that it definitely established tragedy as a distinct 
form on the English popular stage, and invested it with 
proper dignity. 

These are Marlowe's great achievements both in 'Tam- 
burlaine' and in his later more restrained plays. His 
limitations must also be suggested. Like other Eliza- 
bethans he did not fully understand the distinction between 
drama and other literary forms; ' Tamburlaine ' is not 
so much a regularly constructed tragedy, with a struggle 
between nearly equal persons and forces, artistically com- 
plicated and resolved, as an epic poem, a succession of 
adventures in war (and love). Again, in spite of the 
prolog in 'Tamburlaine,' Marlowe, in almost all his plays, 
and following the Elizabethan custom, does attempt scenes 
of humor, but he attains only to the coarse and brutal 
horse-play at which the English audiences had laughed 
for centuries in the Mystery plays and the Interludes. 
Elizabethan also (and before that medieval) is the lack of 
historical perspective which gives to Mongol shepherds 
the manners and speech of Greek classical antiquity as 
Marlowe had learned to know it at the university. More 
serious is the lack of mature skill in characterization. 
Tamburlaine the man is an exaggerated type; most of 
the men about him are his faint shadows, and those who 
are intended to be comic are preposterous. The women, 
though they have some differentiating touches, are cer- 
tainly not more dramatically and vitally imagined. In 
his later plays Marlowe makes gains in this respect, but 
he never arrives at full easy mastery and trenchantly con- 
vincing lifelikeness either in characterization, in presenta- 
tion of action, or in fine poetic finish. It has often been 
remarked that at the age when Marlowe died Shakspere 
had produced not one of the great plays on which his 
reputation rests ; but Shakspere 's genius came to maturity 
more surely, as well as more slowly, and there is no 
basis for the inference sometimes drawn that if Marlowe 
had lived he would ever have equalled or even approached 
Shakespere's supreme achievement. 

Theatrical Conditions and the Theater Buildings. Be- 
fore we pass to Shakspere we must briefly consider those 
external facts which conditioned the form of the Eliza- 
bethan plays and explain many of those things in them 




Timon op Athens, v, 4. Outer Scene. 

Trumpets sound. Enter Alcibiades with his 

Powers before Athens. 
" Ale. Sound to this Coward, and lascivious 

Towne, Our terrible approach." 
Sounds a parly. The Senators appeare upon 

the Wals. 

Reproduced from The Shakespearean Stage, by V. E. Albright, through the 
courtesy of the publishers, the Columbia University Press. 



AN ELIZABETHAN STAGE 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 131 

which at the present time appear perplexing. 

The medieval religious drama had been written and acted 
in many towns throughout the country, and was a far 
less important feature in the life of London than of many 
other places. But as the capital became more and more 
the center of national life, the drama, with other forms 
of literature, was more largely appropiated by it; the 
Elizabethan drama of the great period was altogether writ- 
ten in London and belonged distinctly to it. Until well 
into the seventeenth century, to be sure, the London com- 
panies made frequent tours through the country, but that 
was chiefly when the prevalence of the plagTie had necessi- 
tated the closing of the London theaters or when for 
other reasons acting there had become temporarily un- 
profitable. The companies themselves had now assumed 
a regular organization. They retained a trace of their 
origin (above, page 90) in that each was under the pro- 
tection of some influential noble and was called, for exam- 
ple, 'Lord Leicester's Servants,' or 'The Lord Admiral's 
Servants.' But this connection was for the most part 
nominal — the companies were virtually very much like 
the stock-companies of the nineteenth century. By the 
beginning of the great period the membership of each 
troupe was made up of at least three classes of persons. 
At the bottom of the scale were the boy-apprentices who 
were employed, as Shakspere is said to have been at first, 
in miscellaneous menial capacities. Next came the paid 
actors; and lastly the shareholders, generally also actors, 
some or all of whom were the general managers. The 
writers of plays were sometimes members of the com- 
panies, as in Shakspere 's case; sometimes, however, they 
were independent. 

Until near the middle of Elizabeth's reign there were 
no special theater buildings, but the players, in London 
or elsewhere, acted wherever they could find an available 
place — in open squares, large halls, or, especially, in the 
quadrangular open inner yards of inns. As the profes- 
sion became better organized and as the plays gained 
in quality, such makeshift accommodations became more 
and more unsatisfactory; but there were special difficul- 
ties in the way of securing better ones in London. For the 
population and magistrates of London were prevailingly 



132 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Puritan, and the great body of the Puritans, then as 
always, were strongly opposed to the theater as a frivol- 
ous and irreligious thing — an attitude for which the lives 
of the players and the character of many plays afforded, 
then as almost always, only too much reason. The city was 
very jealous of its prerogatives; so that in spite of Queen 
Elizabeth's strong patronage of the drama, throughout 
her whole reign no public theater buildings were allowed 
within the limits of the city corporation. But these limits 
were narrow, and in 1576 James Burbage inaugurated a 
new era by erecting 'The Theater' just to the north of 
the 'city,' only a few minutes' walk from the center of 
population. His example was soon followed by other man- 
agers, though the favorite place for the theaters soon 
came to be the 'Bankside,' the region in Southwark just 
across the Thames from the 'city' where Chaucer's Tabard 
Inn had stood and where pits for bear-baiting and cock- 
fighting had long nourished. 

The structure of the Elizabethan theater was naturally 
imitated from its chief predecessor, the inn-yard. There, 
under the open sky, opposite the street entrance, the 
players had been accustomed to set up their stage. About 
it, on three sides, the ordinary part of the audience had 
stood during the performance, while the inn-guests and 
persons able to pay a fixed price had sat in the open gal- 
leries which lined the building and ran all around the 
yard. In the theaters, therefore, at first generally square- 
built or octagonal, the stage projected from the rear wall 
well toward the center of an unroofed pit (the present-day 
'orchestra'), where, still on three sides of the stage, the 
common people, admitted for sixpence or less, stood and 
jostled each other, either going home when it rained or 
staying and getting wet as the degree of their interest 
in the play might determine. The enveloping building 
proper was occupied with tiers of galleries, generally two 
or three in number, provided with seats; and here, of 
course, sat the people of means, the women avoiding em- 
barrassment and annoyance only by being always masked. 
Behind the unprotected front part of the stage the mid- 
dle part was covered by a lean-to roof sloping down from 
the rear wall of the building and supported by two pil- 
lars standing on the stage. This roof concealed a loft, 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 133 

from which gods and goddesses or any appropriate proper- 
ties could be let down by mechanical devices. Still far- 
ther back, under the galleries, was the 'rear-stage,' which 
could be used to represent inner rooms; and that part 
of the lower gallery immediately above it was generally ap- 
propriated as a part of the stage, representing such places 
as city walls or the second stories of houses. The musi- 
cians' place was also just beside in the gallery. 

The stage, therefore, was a 'platform stage,' seen by 
the audience from almost all sides, not, as in our own 
time, a 'picture-stage,' with its scenes viewed through a 
single large frame. This arrangement made impossible any 
front curtain, though a curtain was generally hung before 
the rear stage, from the floor of the gallery. Hence the 
changes between scenes must generally be made in full 
view of the audience, and instead of ending the scenes 
with striking situations the dramatists must arrange for 
a withdrawal of the actors, only avoiding if possible the 
effect of a mere anti-climax. Dead bodies must either get 
up and walk away in plain sight or be carried off, either 
by stage hands, or, as part of the action, by other char- 
acters in the play. This latter device was sometimes 
adopted at considerable violence to probability, as when 
Shakspere makes Falstaff bear away Hotspur, and Ham- 
let, Polonius. Likewise, while the medieval habit of elab- 
orate costuming was continued, there was every reason 
for adhering to the medieval simplicity of scenery. A 
single potted tree might symbolize a forest, and houses 
and caverns, with a great deal else, might be left to the 
imagination of the audience. In no respect, indeed, was 
realism of setting an important concern of either dramatist 
or audience; in many cases, evidently, neither of them 
cared to think of a scene as located in any precise spot; 
hence the anxious effort of Shakspere 's editors on this 
point is beside the mark. This nonchalance made for 
easy transition from one place to another, and the whole 
simplicity of staging had the important advantage of 
allowing the audience to center their attention on the 
play rather than on the accompaniments. On the rear- 
stage, however, behind the curtain, more elaborate scenery 
might be placed, and Elizabethan plays, like those of our 
own day, seem sometimes to have 'alternation scenes ' in- 



134 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tended to be acted in front, while the next background was 
being prepared behind the balcony curtain. The lack of 
elaborate settings also facilitated rapidity of action, and 
the plays, beginning at three in the afternoon, were ordi- 
narily over by the dinner-hour of five. Less satisfactory 
was the entire absence of women- actors, who did not ap- 
pear on the public stage until after the Restoration of 
1660. The inadequacy of the boys who took the part of the 
women-characters is alluded to by Shakspere and must 
have been a source of frequent irritation to any dramatist 
who was attempting to present a subtle or complex heroine. 

Lastly may be mentioned the picturesque but very ob- 
jectionable custom of the young dandies who insisted on 
carrying their chairs onto the sides of the stage itself, 
where they not only made themselves conspicuous objects 
of attention but seriously crowded the actors and rudely 
abused them if the play was not to their liking. 

It should be added that from the latter part of Eliza- 
beth's reign there existed within the city itself certain 
'private' theaters, used by the boys' companies and others, 
whose structure was more like that of the theaters of our 
own time and where plays were given by artificial light. 

Shakspere, 1564-1616. William Shakspere, by universal 
consent the greatest author of England, if not of the world, 
occupies chronologically a central position in the Eliza- 
bethan drama. He was born in 1564 in the good-sized 
village of Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, near the 
middle of England, where the level but beautiful country 
furnished full external stimulus for a poet's eye and heart. 
His father, John Shakspere, who was a general dealer in 
agricultural products and other commodities, was one of 
the chief citizens of the village, and during his son's child- 
hood was chosen an alderman and shortly after mayor, 
as we should call it. But by 1577 his prosperity declined, 
apparently through his own shiftlessness, and for many 
years he was harassed with legal difficulties. In the village 
'grammar' school William Shakspere had acquired the 
rudiments of book-knowledge, consisting largely of Latin, 
but his chief education was from Nature and experience. 
As his father's troubles thickened he was very likely re- 
moved from school, but at the age of eighteen, under cir- 
cumstances not altogether creditable to himself, he mar- 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 135 

ried Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior, 
who lived in the neighboring village of Shottery. The 
suggestion that the marriage proved positively unhappy is 
supported by no real evidence, but what little is known 
of Shakspere 's later life implies that it was not excep- 
tionally congenial. Two girls and a boy were born from 
it. 

In his early manhood, apparently between 1586 and 1588, 
Shakspere left Stratford to seek his fortune in London. 
As to the circumstances, there is reasonable plausibility 
in the later tradition that he had joined in poaching raids 
on the deer-park of Sir Thomas Lucy, a neighboring coun- 
try gentleman, and found it desirable to get beyond the 
bounds of that gentleman's authority. It is also likely 
enough that Shakspere had been fascinated by the per- 
formances of traveling dramatic companies at Stratford 
and by the Earl of Leicester's costly entertainment of 
Queen Elizabeth in 1575 at the castle of Kenilworth, not 
many miles away. At any rate, in London he evidently 
soon secured mechanical employment in a theatrical com- 
pany, presumably the one then known as Lord Leicester's 
company, with which, in that case, he was always there- 
after connected. His energy and interest must soon have 
won him the opportunity to show his skill as actor and 
also reviser and collaborator in play-writing, then as in- 
dependent author; and after the first few years of slow 
progress his rise was rapid. He became one of the leading 
members, later one of the chief shareholders, of the com- 
pany, and evidently enjoyed a substantial reputation as a 
playwright and a good, though not a great, actor. This 
was both at Court (where, however, actors had no social 
standing) and in the London dramatic circle. Of his 
personal life only the most fragmentary record has been 
preserved, through occasional mentions in miscellaneous 
documents, but it is evident that his rich nature was 
partly appreciated and thoroughly loved by his associates. 
His business talent was marked and before the end of his 
dramatic career he seems to have been receiving as man- 
ager, shareholder, playwright and actor, a yearly income 
equivalent to $25,000 in money of the present time. He 
early began to devote attention to paying the debts of 
his father, who lived until 1601, and restoring the for- 



136 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tunes of his family in Stratford. The death of his only 
son, Hamnet, in 1596, must have been a severe blow to 
him, but he obtained from the Heralds' College the grant 
of a family coat of arms, which secured the position of 
the family as gentlefolks ; in 1597 he purchased New Place, 
the largest house in Stratford; and later on he acquired 
other large property rights there. How often he may 
have visited Stratford in the twenty-five years of his ca- 
reer in London we have no information; but however 
enjoyable London life and the society of the writers at 
the 'Mermaid' Tavern may have been to him, he probably 
always looked forward to ending his life as the chief 
country gentleman of his native village. Thither he re- 
tired about 1610 or 1612, and there he died prematurely 
in 1616, just as he was completing his fifty-second year. 
Shakspere 's dramatic career falls naturally into four 
successive divisions of increasing maturity. To be sure, 
no definite record of the order of his plays has come down 
to us, and it can scarcely be said that we certainly know 
the exact date of a single one of them; but the evidence 
of the title-page dates of such of them as were hastily 
published during his lifetime, of allusions to them in other 
writings of the time, and other scattering facts of one 
sort or another, joined with the more important internal 
evidence of comparative maturity of mind and art which 
shows 'Macbeth' and 'The Winter's Tale,' for example, 
vastly superior to 'Love's Labour's Lost' — all this evi- 
dence together enables us to arrange the plays in a chron- 
ological order which is certainly approximately correct. 
The first of the four periods thus disclosed is that of ex- 
periment and preparation, from about 1588 to about 1593, 
when Shakspere tried his hand at virtually every current 
kind of dramatic work. Its most important product is 
'Richard III,' a melodramatic chronicle-history play, 
largely imitative of Marlowe and yet showing striking 
power. At the end of this period Shakspere issued two 
rather long narrative poems on classical subjects, 'Venus 
and Adonis,' and 'The Rape of Lucrece,' dedicating them 
both to the young Earl of Southampton, who thus appears 
as his patron. Both display great fluency in the most 
luxuriant and sensuous Renaissance manner, and though 
they appeal little to the taste of the present day 'Venus 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 137 

and Adonis,' in particular, seems to have become at once 
the most popular poem of its own time. Shakspere him- 
self regarded them very seriously, publishing them with 
care, though he, like most Elizabethan dramatists, never 
thought it worth while to put his plays into print except 
to safeguard the property rights of his company in them. 
Probably at about the end of his first period, also, he 
began the composition of his sonnets, of which we have 
already spoken (page 119). 

The second period of Shakspere 's work, extending from 
about 1594 to about 1601, is occupied chiefly with chron- 
icle-history plays and happy comedies. The chronicle- 
history plays begin (probably) with the subtile and fas- 
cinating, though not yet absolutely masterful study of con- 
trasting characters in 'Richard II'; continue through the 
two parts of 'Henry IV,' where the realistic comedy ac- 
tion of Falstaff and his group makes history familiarly 
vivid; and end with the epic glorification of a typical 
English hero-king in 'Henry V.' The comedies include 
the charmingly fantastic 'Midsummer Night's Dream'; 
'The Merchant of Venice,' where a story of tragic stern- 
ness is strikingly contrasted with the most poetical idealiz- 
ing romance and yet is harmoniously blended into it; 
'Much Ado About Nothing,' a magnificent example of 
high comedy of character and wit; 'As You Like It,' the 
supreme delightful achievement of Elizabethan and all 
English pastoral romance; and 'Twelfth Night,' where 
again charming romantic sentiment is made believable by 
combination with a story of comic realism. Even in the 
one, unique, tragedy of the period, 'Romeo and Juliet,' 
the main impression is not that of the predestined 
tragedy, but that of ideal youthful love, too gloriously 
radiant to be viewed with sorrow even in its fatal out- 
come. 

The third period, extending from about 1601 to about 
1609, includes Shakspere 's great tragedies and certain cyn- 
ical plays, which formal classification mis-names comedies. 
In these plays as a group Shakspere sets himself to grapple 
with the deepest and darkest problems of human char- 
acter and life ; but it is only very uncertain inference that 
he was himself passing at this time through a period of 
bitterness and disillusion. 'Julius Ciesar' presents the 



138 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

material failure of an unpractical idealist (Brutus) ; 
'Hamlet' the struggle of a perplexed and divided soul; 
'Othello' the ruin of a noble life by an evil one through 
the terrible power of jealousy; 'King Lear' unnatural in- 
gratitude working its hateful will and yet thwarted at the 
end by its own excess and by faithful love; and 'Mac- 
beth' the destruction of a large nature by material am- 
bition. Without doubt this is the greatest continuous 
group of plays ever wrought out by a human mind, and 
they are followed by 'Antony and Cleopatra,' which mag- 
nificently portrays the emptiness of a sensual passion 
against the background of a decaying civilization. 

Shakspere did not solve the insoluble problems of life, 
but having presented them as powerfully, perhaps, as is 
possible for human intelligence, he turned in his last pe- 
riod, of only two or three years, to the expression of the 
serene philosophy of life in which he himself must have 
now taken refuge. The noble and beautiful romance- 
comedies, 'Cymbeline,' 'The Winter's Tale,' and 'The 
Tempest, ' suggest that men do best to forget what is pain- 
ful and center their attention on the pleasing and encour- 
aging things in a world where there is at least an inex- 
haustible store of beauty and goodness and delight. 

Shakspere may now well have felt, as his retirement to 
Stratford suggests, that in his nearly forty plays he had 
fully expressed himself and had earned the right to a 
long and peaceful old age. The latter, as we have seen, 
was denied him; but seven years after his death two of 
his fellow-managers assured the preservation of the plays 
whose unique importance he himself did not suspect by 
collecting them in the first folio edition of his complete 
dramatic works. 

Shakspere 's greatness rests on supreme achievement — ■ 
the result of the highest genius matured by experience 
and by careful experiment and labor — in all phases of the 
work of a poetic dramatist. The surpassing charm of his 
rendering of the romantic beauty and joy of life and the 
profundity of his presentation of its tragic side we have 
already suggested. Equally sure and comprehensive is his 
portrayal of characters. With the certainty of absolute 
mastery he causes men and women to live for us, a vast 
representative group, in all the actual variety of age and 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 139 

station, perfectly realized in all the subtile diversities and 
inconsistencies of protean human nature. Not less notable 
than his strong men are his delightful young heroines, 
romantic Elizabethan heroines, to be sure, with an uncon- 
ventionally, many of them, which does not belong to such 
women in the more restricted world of reality, but pure 
embodiments of the finest womanly delicacy, keenness, and 
vivacity. Shakspere, it is true, was a practical dramatist. 
His background characters are often present in the plays 
not in order to be entirely real but in order to furnish 
amusement; and even in the case of the chief ones, just 
as in the treatment of incidents, he is always perfectly 
ready to sacrifice literal truth to dramatic effect. But 
these things are only the corollaries of all successful play- 
writing and of all art. 

To Shakspere 's mastery of poetic expression similarly 
strong superlatives must be applied. For his form he per- 
fected Marlowe's blank verse, developing it to the farthest 
possible limits of fluency, variety, and melody ; though he 
retained the riming couplet for occasional use (partly for 
the sake of variety) and frequently made use also of prose, 
both for the same reason and in realistic or commonplace 
scenes. As regards the spirit of poetry, it scarcely need 
be said that nowhere else in literature is there a like store- 
house of the most delightful and the greatest ideas phrased 
with the utmost power of condensed expression and figura- 
tive beauty. In dramatic structure his greatness is on the 
whole less conspicuous. Writing for success on the Eliza- 
bethan stage, he seldom attempted to reduce its romantic 
licenses to the perfection of an absolute standard. 'Romeo 
and Juliet, ' ' Hamlet, ' and indeed most of his plays, contain 
unnecessary scenes, interesting to the Elizabethans, which 
Sophocles as well as Racine would have pruned away. Yet 
when Shakspere chooses, as in ' Othello,' to develop a play 
with the sternest and most rapid directness, he proves es- 
sentially the equal even of the most rigid technician. 

Shakspere, indeed, although as Ben Jonson said, 'he 
was not for an age but for all time,' was in every respect 
a thorough Elizabethan also, and does not escape the super- 
ficial Elizabethan faults. Chief of these, perhaps, is his 
fondness for 'conceits,' with which he makes his plays, 
especially some of the earlier ones, sparkle, brilliantly, but 



140 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

often inappropriately. In his prose style, again, except in 
the talk of commonplace persons, he never outgrew, or 
wished to outgrow, a large measure of Elizabethan self- 
conscious elegance. Scarcely a fault is his other Eliza- 
bethan habit of seldom, perhaps never, inventing the whole 
of his stories, but drawing the outlines of them from pre- 
vious works — English chronicles, poems, or plays, Italian 
'novels,' or the biographies of Plutarch. But in the ma- 
jority of cases these sources provided him only with bare 
or even crude sketches, and perhaps nothing furnishes 
clearer proof of his genius than the way in which he has 
seen the human significance in stories baldly and wretchedly 
told, where the figures are merely wooden types, and by the 
power of imagination has transformed them into the great- 
est literary masterpieces, profound revelations of the un- 
derlying forces of life. 

Shakspere, like every other great man, has been the 
object of much unintelligent and misdirected adulation, 
but his greatness, so far from suffering diminution, grows 
more apparent with the passage of time and the increase 
of study. 

The theory persistently advocated during the last half century 
that Shakspere 's works were really written not by himself but by 
Francis Bacon or some other person can never gain credence with 
any competent judge. Our knowledge of Shakspere 's life, slight as 
it is, is really at least as great as that which has been preserved of 
almost any dramatist of the period; for dramatists were not then 
looked on as persons of permanent importance. There is really 
much direct contemporary documentary evidence, as we have al- 
ready indicated, of Shakspere 's authorship of the plays and poems. 
No theory, further, could be more preposterous, to any one really 
acquainted with literature, than the idea that the imaginative 
poetry of Shakspere was produced by the essentially scientific and 
prosaic mind of Francis Bacon. As to the cipher systems sup- 
posed to reveal hidden messages in the plays: First, no poet bend- 
ing his energies to the composition of such masterpieces as Shak- 
spere 's could possibly concern himself at the same time with 
weaving into them a complicated and trifling cryptogram. Second, 
the cipher systems are absolutely arbitrary and unscientific, ap- 
plied to any writings whatever can be made to 'prove' anything 
that one likes, and indeed have been discredited in the hands of 
their own inventors by being made to 'prove' far too much. Third, 
it has been demonstrated more than once that the verbal coinci- 
dences on which the cipher systems rest are no more numerous 
than the law of mathematical probabilities requires. Aside from 
actually vicious pursuits, there can be no more melancholy waste 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 141 

of time than the effort to demonstrate that Shakspere is not the 
real author of his reputed works. 

National Life from 1603 to 1660. We have already ob- 
served that, as Shakspere 's career suggests, there was no 
abrupt change in either life or literature at the death of 
Queen Elizabeth iu 1603 ; and in fact the Elizabethan pe- 
riod of literature is often made to include the reign of 
James I, 1603-1625 (the Jacobean period*), or even, es- 
pecially in the case of the drama, that of Charles I, 1625- 
1649 (the Carolean period). Certainly the drama of all 
three reigns forms a continuously developing whole, and 
should be discussed as such. None the less the spirit of the 
first half of the seventeenth century came gradually to be 
widely different from that of the preceding fifty years, and 
before going on to Shakspere 's successors we must stop to 
indicate briefly wherein the difference consists and for this 
purpose to speak of the determining events of the period. 
Before the end of Elizabeth's reign, indeed, there had been 
a perceptible change ; as the queen grew old and morose the 
national life seemed also to lose its youth and freshness. 
Her successor and distant cousin, James of Scotland 
(James I of England), was a bigoted pedant, and under 
his rule the perennial Court corruption, striking in, became 
foul and noisome. The national Church, instead of pro- 
testing, steadily identified itself more closely with the Court 
party, and its ruling officials, on the whole, grew more and 
more worldly and intolerant. Little by little the nation 
found itself divided into two great factions; on the one 
hand the Cavaliers, the party of the Court, the nobles, and 
the Church, who continued to be largely dominated by the 
Renaissance zest for beauty and, especially, pleasure; and 
on the other hand the Puritans, comprising the bulk of the 
middle classes, controlled by the religious principles of the 
Reformation, often, in their opposition to Cavalier frivol- 
ity, stern and narrow, and more and more inclined to 
separate themselves from the English Church in denomina- 
tions of their own. The breach steadily widened until in 
1642, under the arbitrary rule of Charles I, the Civil War 
broke out. In three years the Puritan Parliament was vic- 
torious, and in 1649 the extreme minority of the Puritans, 

* ' Jaco'bus ' is the Latin form of ' James. ' 



142 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

supported by the army, took the unprecedented step of put- 
ting King Charles to death, and declared England a Com- 
monwealth. But in four years more the Parliamentary 
government, bigoted and inefficient, made itself impossible, 
and then for five years, until his death, Oliver Cromwell 
strongly ruled England as Protector. Another year and a 
half of chaos confirmed the nation in a natural reaction, 
and in 1660 the unworthy Stuart race was restored in the 
person of the base and frivolous Charles II. The general 
influence of the forces which produced these events shows 
clearly in the changing tone of the drama, the work of those 
dramatists who were Shakspere's later contemporaries and 
successors. 

Ben Jonson. The second place among the Elizabethan 
and Jacobean dramatists is universally assigned, on the 
whole justly, to Ben Jonson,* who both in temperament 
and in artistic theories and practice presents a complete 
contrast to Shakspere. Jonson, the posthumous son of an 
impoverished gentleman-clergyman, was born in London 
in 1573. At Westminster School he received a permanent 
bent toward classical studies from the headmaster, William 
Camden, who was one of the greatest scholars of the time. 
Forced into the uncongenial trade of his stepfather, a 
master-bricklayer, he soon deserted it to enlist among the 
English soldiers who were helping the Dutch to fight their 
Spanish oppressors. Here he exhibited some of his domi- 
nating traits by challenging a champion from the other 
army and killing him in classical fashion in single combat 
between the lines. By about the age of twenty he was 
back in London and married to a wife whom he later de- 
scribed as being 'virtuous but a shrew,' and who at one 
time found it more agreeable tb live apart from him. He 
became an actor (at which profession he failed) and a 
writer of plays. About 1598 he displayed his distinguish- 
ing realistic style in the comedy 'Every Man in His Hu- 
mour,' which was acted by Shakspere's company, it is said 
through Shakspere's friendly influence. At about the same 
time the burly Jonson killed another actor in a duel and 
escaped capital punishment only through 'benefit of clergy' 
(the exemption still allowed to educated men). 

The plays which Jonson produced during the following 

* This name is spelled without the h. 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 143 

years were chiefly satirical attacks on other dramatists, 
"especially Marston and Dekker, who retorted in kind. Thus 
there developed a fierce actors' quarrel, referred to in 
Shakspere's 'Hamlet,' in which the * children's' companies 
had some active but now uncertain part. Before it was over 
most of the dramatists had taken sides against Jonson, 
whose arrogant and violent self-assertiveness put him at 
odds, sooner or later, with nearly every one with whom he 
had much to do. In 1603 he made peace, only to become 
involved in other, still more, serious difficulties. Shortly 
after the accession of King James, Jonson, Chapman, and 
Marston brought out a comedy, 'Eastward Hoe,' in which 
they offended the king by satirical flings at the needy Scots- 
men to whom James was freely awarding Court positions. 
They were imprisoned and for a while, according to the 
barbarous procedure of the time, were in danger of losing 
their ears and noses. At a banquet celebrating their re- 
lease, Jonson reports, his 'old mother' produced a paper of 
poison which, if necessary, she had intended to administer 
to him to save him from this disgrace, and of which, she 
said, to show that she was 'no churl,' she would herself 
first have drunk. 

Just before this incident, in 1603, Jonson had turned to 
tragedy and written 'Sejanus,' which marks the begin- 
ning of his most important decade. He followed up 'Se- 
janus' after several years with the less excellent 'Catiline,' 
but his most significant dramatic works, on the whole, are 
his four great satirical comedies. 'Volpone, or the Fox,' as- 
sails gross vice; 'Epicoene, the Silent Woman,' ridicules 
various sorts of absurd persons ; ' The Alchemist ' castigates 
quackery and its foolish encouragers; and 'Bartholomew 
Fair' is a coarse but overwhelming broadside at Puritan 
hypocrisy. Strange as it seems in the author of these 
masterpieces of frank realism, Jonson at the same time 
was showing himself the most gifted writer of the Court 
masks, which now, arrived at the last period of their evo- 
lution, were reaching the extreme of spectacular elaborate- 
ness. Early in James' reign, therefore, Jonson was made 
Court Poet, and during the next thirty years he produced 
about forty masks, devoting to them much attention and 
care, and quarreling violently with Inigo Jones, the Court 
architect, who contrived the stage settings. During this 



144 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

period Jonson was under the patronage of various nobles, 
and he also reigned as dictator at the club of literary men 
which Sir Walter Ralegh had founded at the Mermaid 
Tavern (so called, like other inns, from its sign). A well- 
known poetical letter of the dramatist Francis Beaumont 
to Jonson celebrates the club meetings; and equally well 
known is a description given in the next generation from 
hearsay and inference by the antiquary Thomas Fuller: 
'Many were the wit-combats betwixt Shakspere and Ben 
Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon 
and an English man-of-war : Master Jonson, like the former, 
was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his 
performances; Shakespere, with the English man-of-war, 
lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all 
tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the 
quickness of his wit and invention.' 

The last dozen years of Jonson 's life were unhappy. 
Though he had a pension from the Court, he was some- 
times in financial straits ; and for a time he lost his position 
as Court Poet. He resumed the writing of regular plays, 
but his style no longer pleased the public; and he often 
suffered much from sickness. Nevertheless at the Devil 
Tavern he collected about him a circle of younger admirers, 
some of them among the oncoming poets, who were proud 
to be known as ' Sons of Ben, ' and who largely accepted as 
authoritative his opinions on literary matters. Thus his 
life, which ended in 1637, did not altogether go out in 
gloom. On the plain stone which alone, for a long time, 
marked his grave in Westminster Abbey an unknown ad- 
mirer inscribed the famous epitaph, '0 rare Ben Jonson.' 

As a man Jonson, pugnacious, capricious, ill-mannered, 
sometimes surly, intemperate in drink and in other re- 
spects, is an object for only very qualified admiration; 
and as a writer he cannot properly be said to possess that 
indefinable thing, genius, which is essential to the truest 
greatness. But both as man and as writer he manifested 
great force; and in both drama and poetry he stands for 
several distinct literary principles and attainments highly 
important both in themselves and for their subsequent in- 
fluence. 

1. Most conspicuous in his dramas is his realism, often, 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 145 

as we have said, extremely coarse, and a direct reflection 
of his intellect, which was as strongly masculine as his 
body and altogether lacking, where the regular drama was 
concerned, in fineness of sentiment or poetic feeling. He 
early assumed an attitude of pronounced opposition to the 
Elizabethan romantic plays, which seemed to him not only 
lawless in artistic structure but unreal and trifling in at- 
mosphere and substance. (That he was not, however, as 
has sometimes been said, personally hostile to Shakspere is 
clear, among other things, from his poetic tributes in the 
folio edition of Shakspere and from his direct statement 
elsewhere that he loved Shakspere almost to idolatry.) 
Jonson 's purpose was to present life as he believed it to be ; 
he was thoroughly acquainted with its worser side ; and he 
refused to conceal anything that appeared to him signifi- 
cant. His plays, therefore, have very much that is flatly 
offensive to the taste which seeks in literature, prevailingly, 
for idealism and beauty; but they are, nevertheless, gen- 
erally speaking, powerful portrayals of actual life. 

2. Jonson 's purpose, however, was never unworthy; 
rather, it was distinctly to uphold morality. His frankest 
plays, as we have indicated, are attacks on vice and folly, 
and sometimes, it is said, had important reformatory influ- 
ence on contemporary manners. He held, indeed, that in 
the drama, even in comedy, the function of teaching was 
as important as that of giving pleasure. His attitude to- 
ward his audiences was that of a learned schoolmaster, 
whose ideas they should accept with deferential respect; 
and when they did not approve his plays he was outspoken 
in indignant contempt. 

3. Jonson 's self-satisfaction and his critical sense of in- 
tellectual superiority to the generality of mankind pro- 
duce also a marked and disagreeable lack of sympathy in 
his portrayal of both life and character. The world of 
his dramas is mostly made up of knaves, scoundrels, hypo- 
crites, fools, and dupes; and it includes among its really 
important characters very few excellent men and not a 
single really good woman. Jonson viewed his fellow-men, 
in the mass, with complete scorn, which it was one of his 
moral and artistic principles not to disguise. His charac- 
teristic comedies all belong, further, to the particular type 



146 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

which he himself originated, namely, the 'Comedy of Hu- 
mors. ' * 

Aiming in these plays to flail the follies of his time, he 
makes his chief characters, in spite of his realistic purpose, 
extreme and distorted ' humors, ' each, in spite of individual 
traits, the embodiment of some one abstract vice — cowardice, 
sensualism, hypocrisy, or what not. Too often, also, the 
unreality is increased because Jonson takes the characters 
from the stock figures of Latin comedy rather than from 
genuine English life. 

4. In opposition to the free Elizabethan romantic struc- 
ture, Jonson stood for and deliberately intended to revive 
the classical style; though with characteristic good sense 
he declared that not all the classical practices were ap- 
plicable to English plays. He generally observed .unity 
not only of action but also of time (a single day) and place, 
sometimes with serious resultant loss of probability. In 
his tragedies, 'Sejanus' and 'Catiline,' he excluded comic 
material; for the most part he kept scenes of death and 
violence off the stage; and he very carefully and slowly 
constructed plays which have nothing, indeed, of the poetic 
greatness of Sophocles or Euripides (rather a Jonsonese 
broad solidity) but which move steadily to their climaxes 
and then on to the catastrophes in the compact classical 
manner. He carried his scholarship, however, to the point 
of pedantry, not only in the illustrative extracts from 
Latin authors with which in the printed edition he filled 
the lower half of his pages, but in the plays themselves in 
the scrupulous exactitude of his rendering of the details of 
Roman life. The plays reconstruct the ancient world with 
much more minute accuracy than do Shakspere's; the stu- 
dent should consider for himself whether they succeed 
better in reproducing its human reality, making it a living 

* The meaning of this term can be understood only by some ex- 
planation of the history of the word 'Humor.' In the first place 
this was the Latin name for 'liquid.' According to medieval physi- 
ology there were four chief liquids in the human body, namely 
blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile, and an excess of any of them 
produced an undue predominance of the corresponding quality; 
thus, an excess of phlegm made a person phlegmatic, or dull; or 
an excess of black bile, melancholy. In the Elizabethan idiom, 
therefore, 'humor' came to mean a mood, and then any exagger- 
ated quality or marked peculiarity in a person. 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 147 

part of the reader's mental and spiritual possessions. 

5. Jonson's style in his plays, especially the blank verse 
of his tragedies, exhibits the same general characteristics. 
It is strong, compact, and sometimes powerful, but it en- 
tirely lacks imaginative poetic beauty — it is really only 
rhythmical prose, though sometimes suffused with passion. 

6. The surprising skill which Jonson, author of such plays, 
showed in devising the court masks, daintily unsubstan- 
tial creations of moral allegory, classical myth, and Teu- 
tonic folklore, is rendered less surprising, perhaps, by the 
lack in the masks of any very great lyric quality. There 
is no lyric quality at all in the greater part of his non- 
dramatic verse, though there is an occasional delightful 
exception, as in the famous 'Drink to me only with thine 
eyes. ' But of his non-dramatic verse we shall speak in the 
next chapter. 

7. Last, and not least: Jonson's revolt from romanticism 
to classicism initiated, chiefly in non-dramatic verse, the 
movement for restraint and regularity, which, making slow 
headway during the next half century, was to issue in the 
triumphant pseudo-classicism of the generations of Dryden 
and Pope. Thus, notable in himself, he was significant also 
as one of the moving forces of a great literary revolution. 

The Other Dramatists. From the many other dramatists 
of this highly dramatic period, some of whom in their own 
day enjoyed a reputation fully equal to that of Shakspere 
and Jonson, we may merely select a few for brief mention. 
For not only does their light now pale hopelessly in the 
presence of Shakspere, but in many cases their violations 
of taste and moral restraint pass the limits of present-day 
tolerance. Most of them, like Shakspere, produced both 
comedies and tragedies, prevailingly romantic but with ele- 
ments of realism; most of them wrote more often in col- 
laboration than did Shakspere; they all shared the Eliza- 
bethan vigorously creative interest in life ; but none of them 
attained either Shakspere 's wisdom, his power, or his mas- 
tery of poetic beauty. One of the most learned of the group 
was George Chapman, whose verse has a Jonsonian solidity 
not unaccompanied with Jonsonian ponderousness. He 
won fame also in non-dramatic poetry, especially by vigor- 
ous but rather clumsy verse translations of the ' Iliad ' and 
'Odyssey.' Another highly individual figure is that of 



148 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Thomas Dekker, who seems to have been one of the com- 
pletest embodiments of irrepressible Elizabethan cheerful- 
ness, though this was joined in him with an irresponsibil- 
ity which kept him commonly floundering in debt or con- 
fined in debtor's prison. His 'Shoemaker's Holiday' 
(1600), still occasionally chosen by amateur companies for 
reproduction, gives a rough-and-ready but (apart from its 
coarseness) charming romanticized picture of the life of 
London apprentices and whole-hearted citizens. Thomas 
Hey wood, a sort of journalist before the days of news- 
papers, produced an enormous amount of work in various 
literary forms; in the drama he claimed to have had 'an 
entire hand, or at least a maine finger' in no less than two 
hundred and twenty plays. Inevitably, therefore, he is 
careless and slipshod, but some of his portrayals of sturdy 
English men and women and of romantic adventure (as 
in 'The Fair Maid of the West') are of refreshing natural- 
ness and breeziness. Thomas Middleton, also a very prolific 
writer, often deals, like Jonson and Heywood, with sordid 
material. John Marston, as well, has too little delicacy or 
reserve ; he also wrote catch-as-catch-can non-dramatic sat- 
ires. 

The sanity of Shakspere's plays, continuing and indeed 
increasing toward the end of his career, disguises for mod- 
ern students the tendency to decline in the drama which 
set in at about the time of King James' accession. Not 
later than the end of the first decade of the century the 
dramatists as a class exhibit not only a decrease of origi- 
nality in plot and characterization, but also a lowering of 
moral tone, which results largely from, the closer identifi- 
cation of the drama with the Court party. There is a lack 
of seriousness of purpose, an increasing tendency to re- 
turn, in more morbid spirit, to the sensationalism of the 
1580 's, and an anxious straining to attract and please the 
audiences by almost any means. These tendencies appear 
in the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, whose 
reputations are indissolubly linked together in one of the 
most famous literary partnerships of all time. Beaumont, 
however, was short-lived, and much the greater part of the 
fifty and more plays ultimately published under their joint 
names really belong to Fletcher alone or to Fletcher and 
other collaborators. The scholarship of our day agrees with 



THE DRAMA FROM ABOUT 1550 TO 1642 149 

the opinion of their contemporaries in assigning to Beau- 
mont the greater share of judgment and intellectual power 
and to Fletcher the greater share of spontaneity and fancy. 
Fletcher 's style is very individual. It is peculiarly sweet ; 
but its unmistakable mark is his constant tendency to break 
down the blank verse line by the use of extra syllables, 
both within the line and at the end. The lyrics which he 
scatters through his plays are beautifully smooth and 
musical. The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, as a group, 
are sentimentally romantic, often in an extravagant degree, 
though their charm often conceals the extravagance as well 
as the lack of true characterization. They are notable often 
for their portrayal of the loyal devotion of both men and 
women to king, lover, or friend. One of the best of them 
is 'Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding,' while Fletcher's 
'Faithful Shepherdess' is the most pleasing example in 
English of the artificial pastoral drama in the Italian and 
Spanish style. 

The Elizabethan tendency to sensational horror finds its 
greatest artistic expression in two plays of John Webster, 
'The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona,' and 'The 
Duchess of Main. ' Here the corrupt and brutal life of the 
Italian nobility of the Renaissance is presented with ter- 
rible frankness, but with an overwhelming sense for pas- 
sion, tragedy, and pathos. The most moving pathos per- 
meates some of the plays of John Ford (of the time of 
Charles I), for example, 'The Broken Heart'; but they 
are abnormal and unhealthy. Philip Massinger, a pupil 
and collaborator of Fletcher, was of thoughtful spirit, and 
apparently a sincere moralist at heart, in spite of much 
concession in his plays to the contrary demands of the time. 
His famous comedy, 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts,' a 
satire on greed and cruelty, is one of the few plays of the 
period, aside from Shakspere's, which are still occasionally 
acted. The last dramatist of the whole great line was 
James Shirley, who survived the Commonwealth and the 
Restoration and died of exposure at the Fire of London in 
1666. In his romantic comedies and comedies of manners 
Shirley vividly reflects the thoughtless life of the Court of 
Charles I and of the well-to-do contemporary London citi- 
zens and shows how surprisingly far that life had pro- 
gressed toward the reckless frivolity and abandonment 



150 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

which after the interval of Puritan rule were to run riot 
in the Restoration period. 

The great Elizabethan dramatic impulse had thus be- 
come deeply degenerate, and nothing could be more fitting 
than that it should be brought to a definite end. When 
the war broke out in 1642 one of the first acts of Parlia- 
ment, now at last free to work its will on the enemies of 
Puritanism, was to decree that 'whereas public sports do 
not well agree with public calamities, nor public stage- 
plays with the seasons of humiliation,' all dramatic per- 
formances should cease. This law, fatal, of course, to the 
writing as well as the acting of plays, was enforced with 
only slightly relaxing rigor until very shortly before the 
Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Doubtless to the Puri- 
tans it seemed that their long fight against the theater had 
ended in permanent triumph; but this was only one of 
many respects in which the Puritans were to learn that 
human nature cannot be forced into permanent conformity 
with any rigidly over-severe standard, on however high 
ideals it may be based. 

Summary. The chief dramatists of the whole sixty years 
of the great period may be conveniently grouped as fol- 
lows: I. Shakspere's early contemporaries, about 1580 to 
about 1593 : Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Marlowe. II. Shaks- 
pere. III. Shakspere's later contemporaries, under Eliza- 
beth and James I : Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Heywood, 
Middleton, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster. 
IV. The last group, under James I and Charles I, to 1642 : 
Ford, Massinger, and Shirley. 



CHAPTER VII 

PERIOD V. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, 1603-1660. PROSE 
AND POETRY 

{For political and social facts and conditions, see above, 
page 141.*) 

The first half of the seventeenth century as a whole, 
compared with the Elizabethan age, was a period of relaxing 
vigor. The Renaissance enthusiasm had spent itself, and 
in place of the danger and glory which had long united 
the nation there followed increasing dissension in religion 
and politics and uncertainty as to the future of England 
and, indeed, as to the whole purpose of life. Through 
increased experience men were certainly wiser and more 
sophisticated than before, but they were also more self- 
conscious and sadder or more pensive. The output of liter- 
ature did not diminish, but it spread itself over wider fields, 
in general fields of somewhat recondite scholarship rather 
than of creation. Nevertheless this period includes in 
prose one writer greater than any prose writer of the pre- 
vious century, namely Francis Bacon, and, further, the 
book which unquestionably occupies the highest place in 
English literature, that is the King James version of the 
Bible ; and in poetry it includes one of the very greatest 
figures, John Milton, together with a varied and highly 
interesting assemblage of lesser lyrists. 

Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, 1561-1626. f 
Francis Bacon, intellectually one of the most eminent Eng- 
lishmen of all times, and chief formulator of the methods 

* One of the best works of fiction dealing with the period is 
J. H. Shorthouse's 'John Inglesant.' 

fMacaulay's well-known essay on Bacon is marred by Macau- 
lay's besetting faults of superficiality and dogmatism and is best 
left unread. 

151 



152 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of modern science, was born in 1561 (three years before 
Shakspere), the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper 
of the Great Seal under Queen Elizabeth and one of her 
most trusted earlier advisers. The boy's precocity led the 
queen to call him her 'little Lord Keeper.' At the age of 
twelve he, like Wyatt, was sent to Cambridge, where his 
chief impression was of disgust at the unfruitful scholastic 
application of Aristotle's ideas, still supreme in spite of a 
century of Renaissance enlightenment. A very much 
more satisfactory three years' residence in France in the 
household of the English ambassador was terminated in 
1579 (the year of Spenser's ' Shepherd's Calendar') by the 
death of Sir Nicholas. Bacon was now ready to enter on 
the great career for which his talents fitted him, but his 
uncle by marriage, Lord Burghley, though all-powerful 
with the queen, systematically thwarted his progress, from 
jealous consciousness of his superiority to his own son. 
Bacon therefore studied law, and was soon chosen a mem- 
ber of Parliament, where he quickly became a leader. He 
continued, however, throughout his life to devote much of 
his time to study and scholarly scientific writing. 

On the interpretation of Bacon's public actions depends 
the answer to the complex and much-debated question of 
his character. The most reasonable conclusions seem to 
be : that Bacon was sincerely devoted to the public good 
and in his earlier life was sometimes ready to risk his own 
interests in its behalf; that he had a perfectly clear theo- 
retical insight into the principles of moral conduct ; that he 
lacked the moral force of character to live on the level of 
his convictions, so that after the first, at least, his personal 
ambition was often stronger than his conscience; that he 
believed that public success could be gained only by con- 
formity to the low standards of the age; that he fell into 
the fatal error of supposing that his own preeminent endow- 
ments and the services which they might enable him to 
render justified him in the use of unworthy means; that 
his sense of real as distinguished from apparent personal 
dignity was distressingly inadequate ; and that, in general, 
like many men of great intellect, he was deficient in great- 
ness of character, emotion, fine feeling, sympathy, and even 
in comprehension of the highest spiritual principles. He 
certainly shared to the full in the usual courtier's ambi- 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 153 

tion for great place and wealth, and in the worldling's in- 
clination to ostentatious display. 

Having offended Queen Elizabeth by his boldness in suc- 
cessfully opposing an encroachment on the rights of the 
House of Commons, Bacon connected himself with the Earl 
of Essex and received from him many favors ; but when 
Essex attempted a treasonable insurrection in 1601, Bacon, 
as one of the Queen 's lawyers, displayed against him a sub- 
servient zeal which on theoretical grounds of patriotism 
might appear praiseworthy, but which in view of his per- 
sonal obligations was grossly indecent. For the worldly 
prosperity which he sought, however, Bacon was obliged 
to wait until the accession of King James, after which his 
rise was rapid. The King appreciated his ability and often 
consulted him, and he frequently gave the wisest advice, 
whose acceptance might perhaps have averted the worst 
national disasters of the next fifty years. The advice was 
above the courage of both the King and the age ; but Bacon 
was advanced through various legal offices, until in 1613 
he was made Attorney- General and in 1618 (two years after 
Shakspere's death) Lord High Chancellor of England, at 
the same time being raised to the peerage as Baron Ve- 
rulam. During all this period, in spite of his better knowl- 
edge, he truckled with sorry servility to the King and his 
unworthy favorites and lent himself as an agent in their 
most arbitrary acts. Retribution overtook him in 1621, 
within a few days after his elevation to the dignity of 
Viscount St. Albans. The House of Commons, balked in 
an attack on the King and the Duke of Buckingham, sud- 
denly turned on Bacon and impeached him for having re- 
ceived bribes in connection with his legal decisions as Lord 
Chancellor. Bacon admitted the taking of presents 
(against which in one of his essays he had directly cau- 
tioned judges), and threw himself on the mercy of the 
House of Lords, with whom the sentence lay. He appears 
to have been sincere in protesting later that the presents 
had not influenced his decisions and that he was the justest 
judge whom England had had for fifty years; it seems 
that the giving of presents by the parties to a suit was a 
customary abuse. But he had technically laid himself open 
to the malice of his enemies and was condemned to very 
heavy penalties, of which two were enforced, namely, per- 



154 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

petual incapacitation from holding public office, and ban- 
ishment from Court. Even after this he continued, with an 
astonishing lack of good taste, to live extravagantly and be- 
yond his means (again in disregard of his own precepts), 
so that Prince Charles observed that he 'scorned to go out 
in a snuff.' He died in 1626 from a cold caught in the 
prosecution of his scientific researches, namely in an ex- 
periment on the power of snow to preserve meat. 

Bacon's splendid mind and unique intellectual vision 
produced, perhaps inevitably, considering his public ac- 
tivity, only fragmentary concrete achievements. The only 
one of his books still commonly read is the series of 'Es- 
says,' which consist of brief and comparatively informal 
jottings on various subjects. In their earliest form, in 
1597, the essays were ten in number, but by additions from 
time to time they had increased at last in 1625 to fifty-eight. 
They deal with a great variety of topics, whatever Bacon 
happened to be interested in, from friendship to the ar- 
rangement of a house, and in their condensation they are 
more like bare synopses than complete discussions. But 
their comprehensiveness of view, sureness of ideas and 
phrasing, suggestiveness, and apt illustrations reveal the 
pregnancy and practical force of Bacon's thought (though, 
on the other hand, he is not altogether free from the super- 
stitions of his time and after the lapse of three hundred 
years sometimes seems commonplace). The whole general 
tone of the essays, also, shows the man, keen and worldly, 
not at all a poet or idealist. How to succeed and make 
the most of prosperity might be called the pervading 
theme of the essays, and subjects which in themselves sug- 
gest spiritual treatment are actually considered in accord- 
ance with a coldly intellectual calculation of worldly ad- 
vantage. 

The essays are scarcely less notable for style than for 
ideas. "With characteristic intellectual independence 
Bacon strikes out for himself an extremely terse and clear 
manner of expression, doubtless influenced by such Latin 
authors as Tacitus, which stands in marked contrast to the 
formless diffuseness or artificial elaborateness of most 
Elizabethan and Jacobean prose. His unit of structure is 
always a short clause. The sentences are sometimes short, 
sometimes consist of a number of connected clauses; but 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 155 

they are always essentially loose rather than periodic, so 
that the thought is perfectly simple and its movement clear 
and systematic. The very numerous allusions to classical 
history and life are not the result of affectation, but merely 
indicate the natural furnishing of the mind of the educated 
Renaissance gentleman. The essays, it should be added, 
were evidently suggested and more or less influenced by 
those of the great French thinker, Montaigne, an earlier 
contemporary of Bacon. The hold of medieval scholarly 
tradition, it is further interesting to note, was still so strong 
that in order to insure their permanent preservation Bacon 
translated them into Latin — he took for granted that the 
English in which he first composed them and in which 
they will always be known was only a temporary vulgar 
tongue. 

But Bacon's most important work, as we have already 
implied, was not in the field of pure literature but in the 
general advancement of knowledge, particularly knowledge 
of natural science ; and of this great service we must speak 
briefly. His avowal to Burghley, made as early as 1592, 
is famous : 'I have taken all knowledge to be my province.' 
Briefly stated, his purposes, constituting an absorbing and 
noble ambition, were to survey all the learning of his time, 
in all lines of thought, natural science, morals, politics, and 
the rest, to overthrow the current method of a priori de- 
duction, deduction resting, moreover, on very insufficient 
and long-antiquated bases of observation, and to substitute 
for it as the method of the future, unlimited fresh obser- 
vation and experiment and inductive reasoning. This 
enormous task was to be mapped out and its results sum- 
marized in a Latin work called 'Magna Instauratio Scien- 
tiarum' (The Great Renewal of Knowledge) ; but parts 
of this survey were necessarily to be left for posterity to 
formulate, and of the rest Bacon actually composed only a 
fraction. What may be called the first part appeared 
originally in English in 1605 and is known by the abbre- 
viated title, 'The Advancement of Learning'; the expanded 
Latin form has the title, ' De Augmentis Scientiarum. ' Its 
exhaustive enumeration of the branches of thought and 
knowledge, what has been accomplished in each and what 
may be hoped for it in the future, is thoroughly fascinating, 
though even here Bacon was not capable of passionate 



156 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

enthusiasm. However, the second part of the work, 'Novum 
Organum' (The New Method), written in Latin and pub- 
lished in 1620, is the most important. Most interesting 
here, perhaps, is the classification (contrasting with Plato's 
doctrine of divinely perfect controlling ideas) of the 'idols' 
(phantoms) which mislead the human mind. Of these 
Bacon finds four sorts: idols of the tribe, which are in- 
herent in human nature; idols of the cave, the errors of 
the individual; idols of the market-place, due to mistaken 
reliance on words; and idols of the theater (that is, of the 
schools), resulting from false reasoning. 

In the details of all his scholarly work Bacon's knowl- 
edge and point of view were inevitably imperfect. Even 
in natural science he was not altogether abreast of his 
time — he refused to accept Harvey's discovery of the 
manner of the circulation of the blood and the Copernican 
system of astronomy. Neither was he, as is sometimes 
supposed, the inventor of the inductive method of obser- 
vation and reasoning, which in some degree is fundamental 
in all study. But he did, much more fully and clearly 
than any one before him, demonstrate the importance and 
possibilities of that method; modern experimental science 
and thought have proceeded directly in the path which he 
pointed out; and he is fully entitled to the great honor of 
being called their father, which certainly places him 
high among the great figures in the history of human 
thought. 

The King James Bible, 1611. It was during the reign 
of James I that the long series of sixteenth century transla- 
tions of the Bible reached its culmination in what we have 
already called the greatest of all English books (or rather, 
collections of books), the King James ('Authorized') ver- 
sion. In 1604 an ecclesiastical conference accepted a sug- 
gestion, approved by the king, that a new and more ac- 
curate rendering of the Bible should be made. The work 
was entrusted to a body of about fifty scholars, who di- 
vided themselves into six groups, among which the various 
books of the Bible were apportioned. The resulting trans- 
lation, proceeding with the inevitable slowness, was com- 
pleted in 1611, and then rather rapidly superseded all other 
English versions for both public and private use. This 
King James Bible is universally accepted as the chief mas- 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 157 

terpiece of English prose style. The translators followed 
previous versions so far as possible, checking them by com- 
parison with the original Hebrew and Greek, so that while 
attaining the greater correctness at which they aimed they 
preserved the accumulated stylistic excellences of three 
generations of their predecessors; and their language, 
properly varying according to the nature of the different 
books, possesses an imaginative grandeur and rhythm not 
unworthy — and no higher praise could be awarded — of the 
themes which it expresses. The still more accurate scholar- 
ship of a later century demanded the Revised Version of 
1881, but the superior literary quality of the King James 
version remains undisputed. Its style, by the nature of 
the case, was somewhat archaic from the outset, and of 
course has become much more so with the passage of time. 
This entails the practical disadvantage of making the 
Bible — events, characters, and ideas — seem less real and 
living ; but on the other hand it helps inestimably to create 
the finer imaginative atmosphere which is so essential for 
the genuine religious spirit. 

Minor Prose Writers. Among the prose authors of the period 
who hold an assured secondary position in the history of English 
literature three or four may be mentioned: Eobert Burton, Oxford 
scholar, minister, and recluse, whose ' Anatomy of Melancholy' 
(1621), a vast and quaint compendium of information both scien- 
tific and literary, has largely influenced numerous later writers; 
Jeremy Taylor, royalist clergyman and bishop, one of the most 
eloquent and spiritual of English preachers, author of 'Holy Living' 
(1650) and 'Holy Dying' (1651); Izaak Walton, London trades- 
man and student, best known for his ' Compleat Angler' (1653), but 
author also of charming brief lives of Donne, George Herbert, and 
others of his contemporaries; and Sir Thomas Browne, a scholarly 
physician of Norwich, who elaborated a fastidiously poetic Latin- 
ized prose style for his pensively delightful 'Beligio Medici' (A 
Physician's Eeligion — 1643) and other works. 

Lyric Poetry. Apart from the drama and the King 
James Bible, the most enduring literary achievement of the 
period was in poetry. Milton — distinctly, after Shakspere, 
the greatest writer of the century — must receive separate 
consideration ; the more purely lyric poets may be grouped 
together. 

The absence of any sharp line of separation between the 
literature of the reign of Elizabeth and of those of James 



158 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

I and Charles I is no less marked in the case of the lyric 
poetry than of the drama. Some of the poets whom we 
have already discussed in Chapter V continued writing 
until the second decade of the seventeenth century, or later, 
and some of those whom we shall here name had com- 
menced their career well before 1600. Just as in the 
drama, therefore, something of the Elizabethan spirit re- 
mains in the lyric poetry ; yet here also before many years 
there is a perceptible change ; the Elizabethan spontaneous 
joyousness largely vanishes and is replaced by more self- 
conscious artistry or thought. 

The Elizabethan note is perhaps most unmodified in cer- 
tain anonymous songs and other poems of the early years 
of James I, such as the exquisite 'Weep you no more, sad 
fountains.' It is clear also in the charming songs of 
Thomas Campion, a physician who composed both words 
and music for several song-books, and in Michael Drayton, 
a voluminous poet and dramatist who is known to most 
readers only for his finely rugged patriotic ballad on the 
battle of Agincourt. Sir Henry Wotton,* statesman and 
Provost (head) of Eton School, displays the Elizabethan 
idealism in 'The Character of a Happy Life' and in his 
stanzas in praise of Elizabeth, daughter of King James, 
wife of the ill-starred Elector-Palatine and King of Bo- 
hemia, and ancestress of the present English royal fam- 
ily. The Elizabethan spirit is present but mingled with 
seventeenth century melancholy in the sonnets and other 
poems of the Scotch gentleman William Drummond of 
Hawthornden (the name of his estate near Edinburgh), 
who in quiet life-long retirement lamented the untimely 
death of the lady to whom he had been betrothed or medi- 
tated on heavenly things. 

In Drummond appears the influence of Spenser, which 
was strong on many poets of the period, especially on 
some, like William Browne, who continued the pastoral 
form. Another of the main forces, in lyric poetry as 
in the drama, was the beginning of the revival of the 
classical spirit, and in lyric poetry also this was largely 
due to Ben Jonson. As we have already said, the greater 
part of Jonson 's non-aramatic poetry, like his dramas, ex- 

* The first o is pronounced as in note. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 159 

presses chiefly the downright strength of his mind and 
character. It is terse and unadorned, dealing often with 
commonplace things in the manner of the Epistles and 
Satires of Horace, and it generally has more of the 
quality of intellectual prose than of real emotional poetry. 
A very favorable representative of it is the admirable 
eulogy on Shakspere included in the first folio edition of 
Shakspere 's works. In a few instances, however, Jonson 
strikes the true lyric note delightfully. Every one knows 
and sings his two stanzas 'To Celia' — ■ Drink to me only 
with thine eyes,' which would still be famous without 
the exquisitely appropriate music that has come down 
to us from Jonson 's own time, and which are no less 
beautiful because they consist largely of ideas culled from 
the Greek philosopher Theophrastus. In all his poems, 
however, Jonson aims consistently at the classical virtues 
of clearness, brevity, proportion, finish, and elimination 
of all excess. 

These latter qualities appear also in the lyrics which 
abound in the plays of John Fletcher, and yet it cannot 
be said that Fletcher's sweet melody is more classical 
than Elizabethan. His other distinctive quality is the 
tone of somewhat artificial courtliness which was soon 
to mark the lyrics of the other poets of the Cavalier party. 
An avowed disciple of Jonson and his classicism and a 
greater poet than Fletcher is Robert Herrick, who, indeed, 
after Shakspere and Milton, is the finest lyric poet of 
these two centuries. 

Herrick, the nephew of a wealthy goldsmith, seems, after 
a late graduation from Cambridge, to have spent some 
years about the Court and in the band of Jonson 's ' sons. ' 
Entering the Church when he was nearly forty, he re- 
ceived the small country parish of Dean Prior in the 
southwest (Devonshire), which he held for nearly twenty 
years, until 1647, when he was dispossessed by the vic- 
torious Puritans. After the Restoration he was reinstated, 
and he continued to hold the place until his death in 
old age in 1674. He published his poems (all lyrics) 
in 1648 in a collection which he called 'Hesperides and 
Noble Numbers.' The 'Hesperides' (named from the 
golden apples of the classical Garden of the Daughters 
of the Sun) are twelve hundred little secular pieces, the 



160 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

'Noble Numbers' a much less extensive series of religious 
lyrics. Both sorts are written in a great variety of stanza 
forms, all equally skilful and musical. Few of the poems 
extend beyond fifteen or twenty lines in length, and many 
are mere epigrams of four lines or even two. The chief 
secular subjects are: Herrick's devotion to various ladies, 
Julia, Anthea, Perilla, and sundry more, all presumably 
more or less imaginary; the joy and uncertainty of life; the 
charming beauty of Nature; country life, folk lore, and 
festivals; and similar light or familiar themes. Her- 
rick's characteristic quality, so far as it can be de- 
scribed, is a blend of Elizabethan joyousness with classical 
perfection of finish. The finish, however, really the result 
of painstaking labor, such as Herrick had observed in his 
uncle's shop and as Jonson had enjoined, is perfectly 
unobtrusive; so apparently natural are the poems that 
they seem the irrepressible unmeditated outpourings of 
happy and idle moments. In care-free lyric charm Her- 
rick can certainly never be surpassed; he is certainly one 
of the most captivating of all the poets of the world. Some 
of the 'Noble Numbers' are almost as pleasing as the 'Hes- 
perides,' but not because of real religious significance. 
For of anything that can be called spiritual religion Her- 
rick was absolutely incapable; his nature was far too de- 
ficient in depth. He himself and his philosophy of life 
were purely Epicurean, Hedonistic, or pagan, in the sense 
in which we use those terms to-day. His forever con- 
trolling sentiment is that to which he gives perfect ex- 
pression in his best-known song, 'Gather ye rosebuds,' 
namely the Horatian 'Carpe diem' — 'Snatch all possible 
pleasure from the rapidly-fleeting hours and from this 
gloriously delightful world. ' He is said to have performed 
his religious duties with regularity; though sometimes in 
an outburst of disgust at the stupidity of his rustic pa- 
rishioners he would throw his sermon in their faces and 
rush out of the church. But his religion is altogether con- 
ventional. He thanks God for material blessings, prays 
for their continuance, and as the conclusion of every- 
thing, in compensation for a formally orthodox life, or 
rather creed, expects when he dies to be admitted to 
Heaven. The simple naivete with which he expresses this 
skin-deep and primitive faith is, indeed, one of the chief 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 161 

sources of charm in the ' Noble Numbers.' 

Herrick belongs in part to a group of poets who, being 
attached to the Court, and devoting some, at least, of 
their verses to conventional love-making, are called the 
Cavalier Poets. Among the others Thomas Carew follows 
the classical principles of Jonson in lyrics which are facile, 
smooth, and sometimes a little frigid. Sir John Suckling, a 
handsome and capricious representative of all the ex- 
travagances of the Court set, with whom he was enormously 
popular, tossed off with affected carelessness a mass of 
slovenly lyrics of which a few audaciously impudent ones 
are worthy to survive. From the equally chaotic product 
of Colonel Richard Lovelace stand out the two well-known 
bits of noble idealism, 'To Lucasta, Going to the Wars,' 
and 'To Althea, from Prison.' George Wither (1588-1667), 
a much older man than Suckling and Lovelace, may be 
mentioned with them as the writer in his youth of light- 
hearted love-poems. But in the Civil War he took the side 
of Parliament and under Cromwell he rose to the rank of 
major-general. In his later life he wrote a great quantity 
of Puritan religious verse, largely prosy in spite of his 
fluency. 

The last important group among these lyrists is that of 
the more distinctly religious poets. The chief of these, 
George Herbert (1593-1633), the subject of one of the most 
delightful of the short biographies of Izaak Walton, be- 
longed to a distinguished family of the Welsh Border, one 
branch of which held the earldom of Pembroke, so that 
the poet was related to the young noble who may have 
been Shakspere's patron. He was also younger brother 
of Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury, an inveterate 
duellist and the father of English Deism.* Destined by 
his mother to peaceful pursuits, he wavered from the out- 
set between two forces, religious devotion and a passion 
for worldly comfort and distinction. For a long period 
the latter had the upper hand, and his life has been de- 
scribed by his best editor, Professor George Herbert 
Palmer, as twenty-seven years of vacillation and three of 
consecrated service. Appointed Public Orator, or show- 
man, of his university, Cambridge, he spent some years 
in enjoying the somewhat trifling elegancies of life and 

* See below, p. 212. 



162 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in truckling to the great. Then, on the death of his 
patrons, he passed through a period of intense crisis from 
which he emerged wholly spiritualized. The three re- 
maining years of his life he spent in the little country 
parish of Bemerton, just outside of Salisbury, as a fervent 
High Church minister, or as he preferred to name him- 
self, priest, in the strictest devotion to his professional 
duties and to the practices of an ascetic piety which to the 
usual American mind must seem about equally admirable 
and conventional. His religious poems, published after 
his death in a volume called 'The Temple,' show mainly 
two things, first his intense and beautiful consecration to his 
personal God and Saviour, which, in its earnest sincerity, 
renders him distinctly the most representative poet of the 
Church of England, and second the influence of Donne, 
who was a close friend of his mother. The titles of most 
of the poems, often consisting of a single word, are com- 
monly fantastic and symbolical — for example, ' The Collar, ' 
meaning the yoke of submission to God; and his use of 
conceits, though not so pervasive as with Donne, is equally 
contorted. To a present-day reader the apparent affecta- 
tions may seem at first to throw doubt on Herbert's genu- 
ineness; but in reality he was aiming to dedicate to 
religious purposes what appeared to him the highest style 
of poetry. Without question he is, in a true if special 
sense, a really great poet. 

The second of these religious poets, Richard Crashaw,* 
whose life (1612-1649) was not quite so short as Herbert's, 
combined an ascetic devotion with a glowingly sensuous 
esthetic nature that seems rather Spanish than English. 
Born into an extreme Protestant family, but outraged by 
the wanton iconoclasm of the triumphant Puritans, and 
deprived by them of his fellowship at Cambridge, he be- 
came a Catholic and died a canon in the church of the 
miracle-working Lady (Virgin Mary) of Loretto in Italy. 
His most characteristic poetry is marked by extravagant 
conceits and by ecstatic outbursts of emotion that have 
been called more ardent than anything else in English ; 
though he sometimes writes also in a vein of calm and 
limpid beauty. He was a poetic disciple of Herbert, as 
he avowed by humbly entitling his volume 'Steps to the 

* The first vowel is pronounced as in the noun crash. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 163 

Temple.' 

The life of Henry Vaughan* (1621-1695) stands in con- 
trast to those of Herbert and Crashaw both by its length 
and by its quietness. Vaughan himself emphasized his 
Welsh race by designating himself 'The Silurist' (native 
of South Wales). After an incomplete university course 
at Jesus College (the Welsh college), Oxford, and some 
apparently idle years in London among Jonson's disciples, 
perhaps also after serving the king in the war, he 
settled down in his native mountains to the self-denying 
life of a country physician. His important poems were 
mostly published at this time, in 1650 and 1655, in the 
collection which he named 'Silex Scintillans' (The Flam- 
ing Flint), a title explained by the frontispiece, which 
represents a flinty heart glowing under the lightning 
stroke of God's call. Vaughan 's chief traits are a very 
fine and calm philosophic-religious spirit and a carefully 
observant love of external Nature, in which he sees mystic 
revelations of God. In both respects he is closely akin 
to the later and greater Wordsworth, and his 'Retreat' has 
the same theme as Wordsworth's famous 'Ode on Intima- 
tions of Immortality,' the idea namely that children have 
a greater spiritual sensitiveness than older persons, be- 
cause they have come to earth directly from a former life 
in Heaven. 

The contrast between the chief Anglican and Catholic 
religious poets of this period has been thus expressed 
by a discerning critic: 'Herrick's religious emotions are 
only as ripples on a shallow lake when compared to the 
crested waves of Crashaw, the storm-tides of Herbert, and 
the deep-sea stirrings of Vaughan.' 

We may give a further word of mention to the volumi- 
nous Francis Quarles, who in his own day and long after 
enjoyed enormous popularity, especially among members 
of the Church of England and especially for his 'Em- 
blems,' a book of a sort common in Europe for a century 
before his time, in which fantastic woodcuts, like Vaughan 's 
'Silex Scintillans,' were illustrated with short poems of 
religious emotion, chiefly dominated by fear. But Quarles 
survives only as an interesting curiosity. 

Three other poets whose lives belong to the middle of 

* The second a is not now sounded. 



164 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the century may be said to complete this entire lyric 
group. Andrew Marvell, a very moderate Puritan, joined 
with Milton in his office of Latin Secretary under Crom- 
well, wrote much poetry of various sorts, some of it in 
the Elizabethan octosyllabic couplet. He voices a genuine 
love of Nature, like "Wither often in the pastoral form; 
but his best-known poem is the 'Horatian Ode upon Crom- 
well's Return from Ireland,' containing the famous eulogy 
of King Charles' bearing at his execution. Abraham Cow- 
ley, a youthful prodigy and always conspicuous for 
intellectual power, was secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria 
after her flight to Prance and later was a royalist spy in 
England. His most conspicuous poems are his so-called 
'Pindaric Odes,' in which he supposed that he was imi- 
tating the structure of the Greek Pindar but really origi- 
nated the pseudo-Pindaric Ode, a poem in irregular, non- 
correspondent stanzas. He is the last important representa- 
tive of the 'Metaphysical' style. In his own day he was 
acclaimed as the greatest poet of all time, but as is usual 
in such cases his reputation very rapidly waned. Ed- 
mund Waller (1606-1687), a very wealthy gentleman in 
public life who played a flatly discreditable part in the 
Civil W^ar, is most important for his share in shaping the 
riming pentameter couplet into the smooth pseudo-classical 
form rendered famous by Dryden and Pope ; but his 
only notable single poems are two Cavalier love-lyrics in 
stanzas, 'On a Girdle' and 'Go, Lovely Rose.' 

John Milton, 1608-1674. Conspicuous above all his con- 
temporaries as the representative poet of Puritanism, and, 
by almost equally general consent, distinctly the greatest 
of English poets except Shakspere, stands John Milton. 
His life falls naturally into three periods: 1. Youth and 
preparation, 1608-1639, when he wrote his shorter poems. 
2. Public life, 1639-1660, when he wrote, or at least pub- 
lished, in poetry, only a few sonnets. 3. Later years, 
1660-1674, of outer defeat, but of chief poetic achieve- 
ment, the period of 'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained/ 
and 'Samson Agonistes.' 

Milton was born in London in December, 1608. His 
father was a prosperous scrivener, or lawyer of the hum- 
bler sort, and a Puritan, but broad-minded, and his chil- 
dren were brought up in the love of music, beauty, and 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 165 

learning. At the age of twelve the future poet was 
sent to St, Paul's School, and he tells us that from this 
time on his devotion to study seldom allowed him to leave 
his books earlier than midnight. At sixteen, in 1625, he 
entered Cambridge, where he remained during the seven 
years required for the M. A. degree, and where he was 
known as 'the lady of Christ's' [College], perhaps for his 
beauty, of which all his life he continued proud, perhaps 
for his moral scrupulousness. Milton was never, how- 
ever, a conventional prig, and a quarrel with a self-im- 
portant tutor led at one time to his informal suspension 
from the University. His nature, indeed, had many ele- 
ments quite inconsistent with the usual vague popular 
conception of him. He was always not only inflexible in 
his devotion to principle, but — partly, no doubt, from 
consciousness of his intellectual superiority — haughty as 
well as reserved, self-confident, and little respectful of 
opinions and feelings that clashed with his own. Never- 
theless in his youth he had plenty of animal spirits and 
always for his friends warm human sympathies. 

To his college years belong two important poems. His 
Christmas hymn, the 'Ode on the Morning of Christ's 
Nativity,' shows the influence of his early poetical master, 
Spenser, and of contemporary pastoral poets, though it 
also contains some conceits — truly poetic conceits, how- 
ever, not exercises in intellectual cleverness like many of 
those of Donne and his followers. With whatever quali- 
fications, it is certainly one of the great English lyrics, 
and its union of Renaissance sensuousness with grandeur 
of conception and sureness of expression foretell clearly 
enough at twenty the poet of 'Paradise Lost.' The sonnet 
on his twenty-third birthday, further, is known to almost 
every reader of poetry as the best short expression in 
literature of the dedication of one's life and powers to 
God. 

Milton had planned to enter the ministry, but the grow- 
ing predominance of the High-Church party made this im- 
possible for him, and on leaving the University in 1632 he 
retired to the country estate which his parents now occu- 
pied at Horton, twenty miles west of London. Here, for 
nearly six years, amid surroundings which nourished his 
poet's love for Nature, he devoted his time chief! v to 



166 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

further mastery of the whole range of approved literature, 
Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. His poems 
of these years also are few, but they too are of the very 
highest quality. 'L 'Allegro' and 'II Penseroso' are ideal- 
ized visions, in the tripping Elizabethan octosyllabic coup- 
let, of the pleasures of suburban life viewed in moods 
respectively of light-hearted happiness and of reflection. 
'Comus,' the last of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masks, 
combines an exquisite poetic beauty and a real dramatic ac- 
tion more substantial than that of any other mask with 
a serious moral theme (the security of Virtue) in a fashion 
that renders it unique. 'Lycidas' is one of the supreme 
English elegies; though the grief which helps to create its 
power sprang more from the recent death of the poet's 
mother than from that of the nominal subject, his college 
acquaintance, Edward King, and though in the hands of 
a lesser artist the solemn denunciation of the false leaders 
of the English Church might not have been wrought 
into so fine a harmony with the pastoral form. 

Milton's first period ends with an experience designed 
to complete his preparation for his career, a fifteen months ' 
tour in France and Italy, where the highest literary cir- 
cles received him cordially. From this trip he returned 
in 1639, sooner than he had planned, because, he said, the 
public troubles at home, foreshadowing the approaching 
war, seemed to him a call to service; though in fact some 
time intervened before his entrance on public life. 

The twenty years which follow, the second period of 
Milton's career, developed and modified his nature and 
ideas in an unusual degree and fashion. Outwardly the 
occupations which they brought him appear chiefly as an 
unfortunate waste of his great poetic powers. The sixteen 
sonnets which belong here show how nobly this form 
could be adapted to the varied expression of the most 
serious thought, but otherwise Milton abandoned poetry, 
at least the publication of it, for prose, and for prose 
which was mostly ephemeral. Taking up his residence in 
London, for some time he carried on a small private school 
in his own house, where he much overworked his boys in 
the mistaken effort to raise their intellectual ambitions to 
the level of his own. Naturally unwilling to confine him- 
self to a private sphere, he soon engaged in a prose con- 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY 167 

troversy supporting the Puritan view against the Epis- 
copal form of church government, that is against the of- 
fice of bishops. There shortly followed the most re- 
grettable incident in his whole career, which pathetically 
illustrates also the lack of a sense of humor which was per- 
haps his greatest defect. At the age of thirty-four, and 
apparently at first sight, he suddenly married Mary Powell, 
the seventeen-year-old daughter of a royalist country gen- 
tleman with whom his family had long maintained some 
business and social relations. Evidently this daughter of 
the Cavaliers met a rude disillusionment in Milton's Puri- 
tan household and in his Old Testament theory of woman's 
inferiority and of a wife's duty of strict subjection to 
her husband; a few weeks after the marriage she fled 
to her family and refused to return. Thereupon, with 
characteristic egoism, Milton put forth a series of pam- 
phlets on divorce, arguing, contrary to English law, and 
with great scandal to the public, that mere incompatibility 
of temper was adequate ground for separation. He even 
proceeded so far as to make proposals of marriage to an- 
other woman. But after two years and the ruin of the 
royalist cause his wife made unconditional submission, 
which Milton accepted, and he also received and sup- 
ported her whole family in his house. Meanwhile his 
divorce pamphlets had led to the best of his prose writ- 
ings. He had published the pamphlets without the license 
of Parliament, then required for all books, and a suit was 
begun against him. He replied with 'Areopagitica,' an 
eloquent and noble argument against the licensing system 
and in favor of freedom of publication within the widest 
possible limits. (The name is an allusion to the con- 
demnation of the works of Protagoras by the Athenian 
Areopagus.) In the stress of public affairs the attack on 
him was dropped, but the book remains, a deathless plea 
for individual liberty. 

Now at last Milton was drawn into active public life. 
The execution of the King by the extreme Puritan mi- 
nority excited an outburst of indignation not only in 
England but throughout Europe. Milton, rising to the 
occasion, defended the act in a pamphlet, thereby beginning 
a paper controversy, chiefly with the Dutch scholar Sal- 
masius, which lasted for several years. By 1652 it had 



168 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

resulted in the loss of Milton's eyesight, previously over- 
strained by his studies — a sacrifice in which he gloried but 
which lovers of poetry must always regret, especially since 
the controversy largely consisted, according to the cus- 
tom of the time, in a disgusting exchange of personal 
scurrilities. Milton's championship of the existing govern- 
ment, however, together with his scholarship, had at once 
secured for him the position of Latin secretary, or con- 
ductor of the diplomatic correspondence of the State with 
foreign countries. He held this office, after the loss of 
his eyesight, with Marvell as a colleague, under both Parlia- 
ment and Cromwell, but it is an error to suppose that he 
exerted any influence in the management of affairs or 
that he was on familiar terms with the Protector. At the 
Restoration he necessarily lost both the position and a con- 
siderable part of his property, and for a while he went 
into hiding; but through the efforts of Marvell and others 
he was finally included in the general amnesty. 

In the remaining fourteen years which make the third 
period of his life Milton stands out for subsequent ages 
as a noble figure. His very obstinacy and egoism now 
enabled him, blind, comparatively poor, and the representa- 
tive of a lost cause, to maintain his proud and patient dig- 
nity in the midst of the triumph of all that was most 
hateful to him, and, as he believed, to God. His isola- 
tion, indeed, was in many respects extreme, though now 
as always he found the few sympathetic friends on whom 
his nature was quite dependent. His religious beliefs had 
become what would at present be called Unitarian, and he 
did not associate with any of the existing* denominations ; 
in private theory he had even come to believe in polygamy. 
At home he is said to have suffered from the coldness or 
more active antipathy of his three daughters, which is no 
great cause for wonder if we must credit the report that 
he compelled them to read aloud to him in foreign lan- 
guages of which he had taught them the pronunciation 
but not the meaning. Their mother had died some years 
before, and he had soon lost the second wife who is the 
subject of one of his finest sonnets. In 1663, at the age 
of fifty-four, he was united in a third marriage to Elizabeth 
Minshull, a woman of twenty- four, who was to survive him 
for more than fifty years. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 169 

The important fact of this last period, however, is 
that Milton now had the leisure to write, or to complete, 
'Paradise Lost.' For a quarter of a century he had 
avowedly cherished the ambition to produce 'such a work 
as the world would not willingly let die' and had had 
in mind, among others, the story of Man's Fall. Out- 
lines for a treatment of it not in epic but in dramatic form 
are preserved in a list of a hundred possible subjects for 
a great work which he drew up as early as 1640, and 
during the Commonwealth period he seems not only to 
have been slowly maturing the plan but to have com- 
posed parts of the existing poem ; nevertheless the actual 
work of composition belongs chiefly to the years following 
1660. The story as told in Genesis had received much 
elaboration in Christian tradition from a very early period 
and Milton drew largely from this general tradition and 
no doubt to some extent from various previous treatments 
of the Bible narrative in several languages which he might 
naturally have read and kept in mind. But beyond the 
simple outline the poem, like every great work, is es- 
sentially the product of his own genius. He aimed, spe- 
cifically, to produce a Christian epic which should rank 
with the great epics of antiquity and with those of the 
Italian Renaissance. 

In this purpose he was entirely successful. As a whole, 
by the consent of all competent judges, 'Paradise Lost' 
is worthy of its theme, perhaps the greatest that the mind 
of man can conceive, namely 'to justify the ways of 
God.' Of course there are defects. The seventeenth cen- 
tury theology, like every successive theological, philo- 
sophical, and scientific system, has lost its hold on later 
generations, and it becomes dull indeed in the long ex- 
pository passages of the poem. The attempt to express 
spiritual ideas through the medium of the secular epic, 
with its battles and councils and all the forms of physical 
life, is of course rationally paradoxical. It was early 
pointed out that in spite of himself Milton has in some 
sense made Satan the hero of the poem — a reader can 
scarcely fail to sympathize with the fallen archangel in 
his unconquerable Puritan-like resistance to the arbitrary 
decrees of Milton's despotic Deity. Further, Milton's 
personal, English, and Puritan prejudices sometimes in- 



170 A HISTOKY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

trade in various ways. But all these things are on the 
surface. In sustained imaginative grandeur of concep- 
tion, expression, and imagery 'Paradise Lost' yields to 
no human work, and the majestic and varied movement 
of the blank verse, here first employed in a really great 
non-dramatic English poem, is as magnificent as anything 
else in literature. It cannot be said that the later books 
always sustain the greatness of the first two; but the 
profusely scattered passages of sensuous description, at 
least, such as those of the Garden of Eden and of the 
beauty of Eve, are in their own way equally fine. Stately 
and more familiar passages alike show that however much 
his experience had done to harden Milton 's Puritanism, 
his youthful Renaissance love of beauty for beauty's sake 
had lost none of its strength, though of course it could 
no longer be expressed with youthful lightness of fancy 
and melody. The poem is a magnificent example of classical 
art, in the best Greek spirit, united with glowing romantic 
feeling. Lastly, the value of Milton's scholarship should 
by no means be overlooked. All his poetry, from the 
'Nativity Ode' onward, is like a rich mosaic of gems bor- 
rowed from a great range of classical and modern authors, 
and in 'Paradise Lost' the allusions to literature and his- 
tory give half of the romantic charm and very much of 
the dignity. The poem could have been written only by 
one who combined in a very high degree intellectual power, 
poetic feeling, religious idealism, profound scholarship and 
knowledge of literature, and also experienced knowledge 
of the actual world of men. 

'Paradise Lost' was published in 1667. It was followed 
in 1671 by 'Paradise Regained,' only one-third as long 
and much less important; and by 'Samson Agonistes' 
(Samson in his Death Struggle). In the latter Milton 
puts the story of the fallen hero's last days into the 
majestic form of a Greek drama, imparting to it the pas- 
sionate but lofty feeling evoked by the close similarity of 
Samson's situation to his own. This was his last work, 
and he died in 1674. Whatever his faults, the moral, in- 
tellectual and poetic greatness of his nature sets him 
apart as in a sense the grandest figure in English literature. 

John Bunyan. Seventeenth century Puritanism was to 
find a supreme spokesman in prose fiction as well as in 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 171 

poetry; John Milton and John Bunyan, standing at 
widely different angles of experience, make one of the 
most interesting complementary pairs in all literature. By 
the mere chronology of his works, Bunyan belongs in our 
next period, but in his case mere chronology must be dis- 
regarded. 

Bunyan was born in 1628 at the village of Elstow, just 
outside of Bedford, in central England. After very slight 
schooling and some practice at his father's trade of tinker, 
he was in 1644 drafted for two years and a half into gar- 
rison service in the Parliamentary army. Released from 
this occupation, he married a poor but excellent wife and 
worked at his trade ; but the important experiences of his 
life were the religious ones. Endowed by nature with 
great moral sensitiveness, he was nevertheless a person of 
violent impulses and had early fallen into profanity and 
laxity of conduct, which he later described with great ex- 
aggeration as a condition of abandoned wickedness. But 
from childhood his abnormally active dramatic imagina- 
tion had tormented him with dreams and fears of devils 
and hell-fire, and now he entered on a long and agonizing 
struggle between his religious instinct and his obstinate 
self-will. He has told the whole story in his spiritual auto- 
biography, 'Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,' 
which is one of the notable religious books of the world. 
A reader of it must be filled about equally with admira- 
tion for the force of will and perseverance that enabled 
Bunyan at last to win his battle, and pity for the fantastic 
morbidness that created out of next to nothing most of his 
well-nigh intolerable tortures. One Sunday, for example, 
fresh from a sermon on Sabbath observance, he was en- 
gaged in a game of 'cat,' when he suddenly heard within 
himself the question, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go 
to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?' Stupefied, 
he looked up to the sky and seemed there to see the Lord 
Jesus gazing at him 'hotly displeased' and threatening 
punishment. Again, one of his favorite diversions was 
to watch bellmen ringing the chimes in the church steeples, 
and though his Puritan conscience insisted that the pleas- 
ure was 'vain,' still he would not forego it. Suddenly 
one day as he was indulging in it the thought occurred to 
him that God might cause one of the bells to fall and kill 



172 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

him, and lie hastened to shield himself by standing under 
a beam. But, he reflected, the bell might easily rebound 
from the wall and strike him; so he shifted his position 
to the steeple-door. Then 'it came into his head, "How 
if the steeple itself should fall?" ' and with that he fled 
alike from the controversy and the danger. 

Relief came when at the age of twenty-four he joined 
a non-sectarian church in Bedford (his own point of view 
being Baptist) . A man of so energetic spirit could not long 
remain inactive, and within two years he was preaching 
in the surrounding villages. A dispute with the Friends 
had already led to the beginning of his controversial writ- 
ing when in 1660 the Restoration rendered preaching by 
persons outside the communion of the Church of England 
illegal, and he was arrested and imprisoned in Bedford 
jail. Consistently refusing to give the promise of sub- 
mission and abstention from preaching which at any time 
would have secured his release, he continued in prison for 
twelve years, not suffering particular discomfort and work- 
ing for the support of his family by fastening the ends 
onto shoestrings. During this time he wrote and pub- 
lished several of the most important of his sixty books 
and pamphlets. At last, in 1672, the authorities aban- 
doned the ineffective requirement of conformity, and he 
was released and became pastor of his church. Three years 
later he was again imprisoned for six months, and it was 
at that time that he composed the first part of 'The 
Pilgrim's Progress,' which was published in 1678. Dur- 
ing the remaining ten years of his life his reputation and 
authority among the Dissenters almost equalled his earnest 
devotion and kindness, and won for him from his opponents 
the good-naturedly jocose title of 'the Baptist bishop.' 
He died in 1688. 

Several of Bunyan's books are strong, but none of the 
others is to be named together with 'The Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress.' This has been translated into nearly or quite a 
hundred languages and dialects — a record never ap- 
proached by any other book of English authorship. The 
sources of its power are obvious. It is the intensely 
sincere presentation by a man of tremendous moral energy 
of what he believed to be the one subject of eternal and 
incalculable importance to every human being, the sub- 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 173 

ject namely of personal salvation. Its language and style, 
further, are founded on the noble and simple model of 
the English Bible, which was almost the only book that 
Bunyan knew, and with which his whole being was sat- 
urated. His triumphant and loving joy in his religion en- 
ables him often to attain the poetic beauty and eloquence 
of his original; but both by instinct and of set purpose 
he rendered his own style even more simple and direct, 
partly by the use of homely vernacular expressions. What 
he had said in 'Grace Abounding' is equally true here: 
'I could have stepped into a style much higher . . . but 
I dare not. God did not play in convincing of me . . . 
wherefore I may not play in my relating of these ex- 
periences.' 'Pilgrim's Progress' is perfectly intelligible 
to any child, and further, it is highly dramatic and pic- 
turesque. It is, to be sure, an allegory, but one of those 
allegories which seem inherent in the human mind and 
hence more natural than the most direct narrative. For 
all men life is indeed a journey, and the Slough of Des- 
pond, Doubting Castle, Vanity Pair, and the Valley of 
Humiliation are places where in one sense or another 
every human soul has often struggled and suffered ; so 
that every reader goes hand in hand with Christian and 
his friends, fears for them in their dangers and rejoices 
in their escapes. The incidents, however, have all the 
further fascination of supernatural romance ; and the 
union of this element with the homely sincerity of the style 
accounts for much of the peculiar quality of the book. 
Universal in its appeal, absolutely direct and vivid in man- 
ner — such a work might well become, as it speedily did, 
one of the most famous of world classics. It is interesting 
to learn, therefore, that Bunyan had expected its circula- 
tion to be confined to the common people ; the early edi- 
tions are as cheap as possible in paper, printing, and 
illustrations. 

Criticism, no doubt, easily discovers in 'Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress' technical faults. The story often lacks the full de- 
velopment and balance of incidents and narration which 
a trained literary artist would have given it; the allegory 
is inconsistent in a hundred ways and places; the char- 
acters are only types ; and Bunyan, always more preacher 
than artist, is distinctly unfair to the bad ones among 



174 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

them. But these things are unimportant. Every allegory 
is inconsistent, and Bunyan repeatedly takes pains to em- 
phasize that this is a dream; while the simplicity of char- 
acter-treatment increases the directness of the main effect. 
When all is said, the book remains the greatest example in 
literature of what absolute earnestness may make possible 
for a plain and untrained man. Nothing, of course, can 
alter the fundamental distinctions. 'Paradise Lost' is 
certainly greater than 'Pilgrim's Progress,' because it 
is the work of a poet and a scholar as well as a religious 
enthusiast. But 'Pilgrim's Progress,' let it be said frankly, 
will always find a dozen readers where Milton has one by 
choice, and no man can afford to think otherwise than 
respectfully of achievements which speak powerfully and 
nobly to the underlying instincts and needs of all man- 
kind. 

The naturalness of the allegory, it may be added, ren- 
ders the resemblance of ' Pilgrim 's Progress ' to many previ- 
ous treatments of the same theme and to less closely 
parallel works like 'The Faerie Queene' probably acci- 
dental; in any significant sense Bunyan probably had no 
other source than the Bible and his own imagination. 



CHAPTER VIII 

PERIOD VI. THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700. 

{For the political events leading up to the Restoration 
see above, pages 141-142.)* 

General Conditions and Characteristics. The repudia- 
tion of the Puritan rule by the English people and the 
Restoration of the Stuart kings in the person of Charles II, 
in 1660, mark one of the most decisive changes in English 
life and literature. The preceding half century had really 
been transitional, and during its course, as we have seen, 
the Elizabethan adventurous energy and half-naif great- 
ness of spirit had more and more disappeared. With the 
coming of Charles II the various tendencies which had been 
replacing these forces seemed to crystallize into their almost 
complete opposites. This was true to a large extent 
throughout the country ; but it was especially true of Lon- 
don and the Court party, to which literature of most sorts 
was now to be perhaps more nearly limited than ever 
before. 

The revolt of the nation was directed partly against the 
irresponsible injustice of the Puritan military government 
but largely also against the excessive moral severity of 
the whole Puritan regime. Accordingly a large part of 
the nation, but particularly the Court, now plunged into 
an orgy of self-indulgence in which moral restraints almost 
ceased to be regarded. The new king and his nobles had 
not only been led by years of proscription and exile to hate 
on principle everything that bore the name of Puritan, but 
had spent their exile at the French Court, where utterly 
cynical and selfish pursuit of pleasure and licentiousness 
of conduct were merely masked by conventionally 

* This is the period of Scott's 'Old Mortality' and < Legend of 
Montrose.' 

175 



176 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

polished manners. The upshot was that the quarter 
century of the renewed Stuart rule was in almost all 
respects the most disgraceful period of English history 
and life. In everything, so far as possible, the restored 
Cavaliers turned their backs on their immediate predeces- 
sors. The Puritans, in particular, had inherited the en- 
thusiasm which had largely made the greatness of the 
Elizabethan period but had in great measure shifted it 
into the channel of their religion. Hence to the Restora- 
tion courtiers enthusiasm and outspoken emotion seemed 
marks of hypocrisy and barbarism. In opposition to such 
tendencies they aimed to realize the ideal of the man of 
the world, sophisticated, skeptical, subjecting everything 
to the scrutiny of the reason, and above all, well-bred. 
Well-bred, that is, according to the artificial social stand- 
ards of a selfish aristocratic class; for the actual manners 
of the courtiers, as of such persons at all times, were in 
many respects disgustingly crude. In religion most of 
them professed adherence to the English Church (some 
to the Catholic), but it was a conventional adherence to an 
institution of the State and a badge of party allegiance, 
not a matter of spiritual conviction or of any really deep 
feeling. The Puritans, since they refused to return to the 
English (Established) Church, now became known as Dis- 
senters. 

The men of the Restoration, then, deliberately repudi- 
ated some of the chief forces which seem to a romantic age 
to make life significant. As a natural corollary they con- 
centrated their interest on the sphere of the practical and 
the actual. In science, particularly, they continued with 
marked success the work of Bacon and his followers. Very 
shortly after the Restoration the Royal Society was founded 
for the promotion of research and scientific knowledge, and 
it was during this period that Sir Isaac Newton (a man 
in every respect admirable) made his vastly important dis- 
coveries in physics, mathematics, and astronomy. 

In literature, both prose and verse, the rationalistic and 
practical spirit showed itself in the enthroning above every- 
thing else of the principles of utility and common sense 
in substance and straightforward directness in style. The 
imaginative treatment of the spiritual life, as in 'Paradise 
Lost' or 'The Faerie Queene,' or the impassioned exalta- 



1 



THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 177 

tion of imaginative beauty, as in much Elizabethan poetry, 
seemed to the typical men of the Restoration unsubstantial 
and meaningless, and they had no ambition to attempt 
nights in those realms. In anything beyond the tangible 
affairs of visible life, indeed, they had little real belief, 
and they preferred that literature should restrain itself 
within the safe limits of the known and the demonstrable. 
Hence the characteristic Restoration verse is satire of a 
prosaic sort which scarcely belongs to poetry at all. More 
fortunate results of the prevailing spirit were the gradual 
abandonment of the conceits and irregularities of the 
'metaphysical' poets, and, most important, the perfecting 
of the highly regular rimed pentameter couplet, the one 
great formal achievement of the time in verse. In prose 
style the same tendencies resulted in a distinct advance. 
Thitherto English prose had seldom attained to thorough 
conciseness and order; it had generally been more or less 
formless or involved in sentence structure or pretentious 
in general manner; but the Restoration writers substan- 
tially formed the more logical and clear-cut manner which, 
generally speaking, has prevailed ever since. 

Quite consistent with this commonsense spirit, as the 
facts were then interpreted, was the allegiance which 
Restoration writers rendered to the literature of classical 
antiquity, an allegiance which has gained for this period 
and the following half-century, where the same attitude 
was still more strongly emphasized, the name 'pseudo- 
classical.' We have before noted that the enthusiasm for 
Greek and Latin literature which so largely underlay the 
Renaissance took in Ben Jonson and his followers, in part, 
the form of a careful imitation of the external technique of 
the classical writers. In Prance and Italy at the same time 
this tendency was still stronger and much more general. 
The seventeenth century was the great period of French 
tragedy (Corneille and Racine), which attempted to base 
itself altogether on classical tragedy. Still more repre- 
sentative, however, were the numerous Italian and French 
critics, who elaborated a complex system of rules, among 
them, for tragedy, those of the 'three unities,' which they 
believed to dominate classic literature. Many of these 
rules were trivial and absurd, and the insistence of the 
critics upon them showed an unfortunate inability to grasp 



178 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the real spirit of the classic, especially of Greek, literature. 
In all this, English writers and critics of the Restoration 
period and the next half-century very commonly followed 
the French and Italians deferentially. Hence it is that 
the literature of the time is pseudo-classical (false clas- 
sical) rather than true classical. But this reduction of 
art to strict order and decorum, it should be clear, was 
quite in accord with the whole spirit of the time. 

One particular social institution of the period should be 
mentioned for its connection with literature, namely the 
coffee houses, which, introduced about the middle of the 
century, soon became very popular and influential. They 
were, in our own idiom, cafes, where men met to sip coffee 
or chocolate and discuss current topics. Later, in the next 
century, they often developed into clubs. 

Minor Writers. The contempt which fell upon the 
Puritans as a deposed and unpopular party found stinging 
literary expression in one of the most famous of English 
satires, Samuel Butler's 'Hudibras.' Butler, a reserved 
and saturnine man, spent much of his uneventful life in 
the employ (sometimes as steward) of gentlemen and 
nobles, one of whom, a Puritan officer, Sir Samuel Luke, 
was to serve as the central lay-figure for his lampoon. 
'Hudibras,' which appeared in three parts during a 
period of fifteen years, is written, like previous English 
satires, in rough-and-ready doggerel verse, in this case verse 
of octosyllabic couplets and in the form of a mock-epic. 
It ridicules the intolerance and sanctimonious hypocrisy of 
the Puritans as the Cavaliers insisted on seeing them in 
the person of the absurd Sir Hudibras and his squire Ralph 
(partly suggested by Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho). 
These sorry figures are made to pass very unheroically 
through a series of burlesque adventures. The chief power 
of the production lies in its fire of witty epigrams, many 
of which have become familiar quotations, for example : 

He could distinguish, and divide, 

A hair ? twixt south and south-west side. 

Compound for sins they are inclined to 
By damning those they have no mind to. 

Though the king and Court took unlimited delight in 
'Hudibras' they displayed toward Butler their usual in- 



THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 179 

gratitude and allowed him to pass his latter years in 
obscure poverty. 

Some of the other central characteristics of the age ap- 
pear in a unique book, the voluminous 'Diary' which 
Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peps), a typical representa- 
tive of the thrifty and unimaginative citizen class, kept in 
shorthand for ten years beginning in 1660. Pepys, who 
ultimately became Secretary to the Admiralty, and was 
a hard-working and very able naval official, was also es- 
tonishingly naif and vain. In his 'Diary' he records in the 
greatest detail, without the least reserve (and with no 
idea of publication) all his daily doings, public and private, 
and a large part of his thoughts. The absurdities and 
weaknesses, together with the better traits, of a man 
spiritually shallow and yet very human are here revealed 
with a frankness unparalleled and almost incredible. Fas- 
cinating as a psychological study, the book also affords the 
fullest possible information about all the life of the period, 
especially the familiar life, not on dress-parade. In rather 
sharp contrast stands the 'Diary' of John Evelyn, which in 
much shorter space and virtually only in a series of 
glimpses covers seventy years of time. Evelyn was a real 
gentleman and scholar who occupied an honorable position 
in national life ; his ' Diary, ' also, furnishes a record, but a 
dignified record, of his public and private experience. 

The Restoration Drama. The moral anarchy of the 
period is most "strikingly exhibited in its drama, particu- 
larly in its comedy and ' comedy of manners. ' These plays, 
dealing mostly with love- actions in the setting of the Court 
or of fashionable London life, and carrying still further 
the general spirit of those of Fletcher and Shirley a 
generation or two earlier, deliberately ridicule moral prin- 
ciples and institutions, especially marriage, and are always 
in one degree or another grossly indecent. Technically 
they are often clever; according to that definition of liter- 
ature which includes a moral standard, they are not litera- 
ture at all. To them, however, we shall briefly return at 
the end of the chapter. 

John Dryden, 1631-1700. No other English literary 
period is so thoroughly represented and summed up in the 
works of a single man as is the Restoration period in 
John Dryden, a writer in some respects akin to Ben Jon- 



180 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

son, of prolific and vigorous talent without the crowning 
quality of genius. 

Dryden, the son of a family of Northamptonshire coun- 
try gentry, was born in 1631. From Westminster School 
and Cambridge he went, at about the age of twenty-six and 
possessed by inheritance of a minimum living income, to 
London, where he perhaps hoped to get political preferment 
through his relatives in the Puritan party. His serious 
entrance into literature was made comparatively late, in 
1659, with a eulogizing poem on Cromwell on the occasion 
of the latter 's death. When, the next year, Charles II 
was restored, Dryden shifted to the Royalist side and 
wrote some poems in honor of the king. Dryden 's char- 
acter should not be judged from this incident and similar 
ones in his later life too hastily nor without regard to 
the spirit of the times. Aside from the fact that Dryden 
had never professed, probably, to be a radical Puritan, 
he certainly was not, like Milton and Bunyan, a heroic 
person, nor endowed with deep and dynamic convictions ; 
on the other hand, he was very far from being base or 
dishonorable — no one can read his works attentively with- 
out being impressed by their spirit of straightforward 
manliness. Controlled, like his age, by cool common sense 
and practical judgment, he kept his mind constantly open 
to new impressions, and was more concerned to avoid the 
appearance of bigotry and unreason than to maintain that 
of consistency. In regard to politics and even religion 
he evidently shared the opinion, bred in many of his con- 
temporaries by the wasteful strife of the previous genera- 
tions, that beyond a few fundamental matters the good 
citizen should make no close scrutiny of details but rather 
render loyal support to the established institutions of the 
State, by which peace is preserved and anarchy restrained. 
Since the nation had recalled Charles II, overthrown Puri- 
tanism, and reestablished the Anglican Church, it prob- 
ably appeared to Dryden an act of patriotism as well as 
of expediency to accept its decision. 

Dryden 's marriage with the daughter of an earl, two 
or three years after the Restoration, secured his social 
position, and for more than fifteen years thereafter his 
life was outwardly successful. He first turned to the 
drama. In spite of the prohibitory Puritan law (above, 



THE KESTORATION, 1660-1700 181 

p. 150), a facile writer, Sir William Davenant, had begun, 
cautiously, a few years before the Restoration, to pro- 
duce operas and other works of dramatic nature; and the 
returning Court had brought from Paris a passion for the 
stage, which therefore offered the best and indeed the only 
field for remunerative literary effort. Accordingly, al- 
though Dryden himself frankly admitted that his talents 
were not especially adapted to writing plays, he proceeded 
to do so energetically, and continued at it, with diminish- 
ing productivity, nearly down to the end of his life, 
thirty-five years later. But his activity always found 
varied outlets. He secured a lucrative share in the profits 
of the King's Playhouse, one of the two theaters of the 
time which alone were allowed to present regular plays, 
and he held the mainly honorary positions of poet laureate 
and historiographer-royal. Later, like Chaucer, he was 
for a time collector of the customs of the port of London. 
He was not much disturbed by ' The Rehearsal, ' a burlesque 
play brought out by the Duke of Buckingham and other 
wits to ridicule current dramas and dramatists, in which 
he figured as chief butt under the name 'Bayes' (poet- 
laureate) ; and he took more than full revenge ten years 
later when in 'Absalom and Achitophel' he drew the 
portrait of Buckingham as Zimri. But in 1680 an out- 
rage of which he was the victim, a brutal and unprovoked 
beating inflicted by ruffians in the employ of the Earl of 
Rochester, seems to mark a permanent change for the 
worse in his fortunes, a change not indeed to disaster but 
to a permanent condition of doubtful prosperity. 

The next year he became engaged in political contro- 
versy, which resulted in the production of his most famous 
work. Charles II was without a legitimate child, and the 
heir to the throne was his brother, the Duke of York, who 
a few years later actually became king as James II. But 
while Charles was outwardly, for political reasons, a mem- 
ber of the Church of England (at heart he was a Catholic), 
the Duke of York was a professed and devoted Catholic, 
and the powerful Whig party, strongly Protestant, was 
violently opposed to him. The monstrous fiction of a 
'Popish Plot,' brought forward by Titus Oates, and the 
murderous frenzy which it produced, were demonstra- 
tions of the strength of the Protestant feeling, and the 



182 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

leader of the Whigs, the Earl of Shaftesbury, proposed 
that the Duke of York should be excluded by law from 
the succession to the throne in favor of the Duke of 
Monmouth, one of the king's illegitimate sons. At last, 
in 1681, the nation became afraid of another civil war, 
and the king was enabled to have Shaftesbury arrested on 
the charge of treason. Hereupon Dryden, at the sugges- 
tion, it is said, of the king, and with the purpose of se- 
curing Shaftesbury's conviction, put forth the First Part 
of l Absalom and Achitophel, ' a masterly satire of Shaftes- 
bury, Monmouth, and their associates in the allegorical 
disguise of the (somewhat altered) Biblical story of David 
and Absalom.* 

In 1685 Charles died and James succeeded him. At 
about the same time Dryden became a Catholic, a change 
which laid him open to the suspicion of truckling for royal 
favor, though in fact he had nothing to gain by it and its 
chief effect was to identify him with a highly unpopular 
minority. He had already, in 1682, written a didactic 
poem, 'Religio Laici' (A Layman's Religion), in which 
he set forth his reasons for adhering to the English Church. 
Now, in 1687, he published the much longer allegorical 
'Hind and the Panther,' a defense of the Catholic Church 
and an attack on the English Church and the Dissenters. 
The next year, King James was driven from the throne, 
his daughter Mary and her husband, William, Prince of 
Orange, succeeded him, and the supremacy of the Church 
of England was again assured. Dryden remained con- 
stant to Catholicism and his refusal to take the oath of 

* The subsequent history of the affair was as follows: Shaftes- 
bury was acquitted by the jury, and his enthusiastic friends struck 
a medal in his honor, which drew from Dryden a short and less 
important satire, ' The Medal. ' To this in turn a minor poet named 
Shadwell replied, and Dryden retorted with 'Mac Flecknoe.' The 
name means ' Son of Flecknoe, ' and Dryden represented Shadwell 
as having inherited the stupidity of an obscure Irish rimester named 
Flecknoe, recently deceased. The piece is interesting chiefly be- 
cause it suggested Pope's 'Duneiad.' Now, in 1682, the political 
tide again turned against Shaftesbury, and he fled from England. 
His death followed shortly, but meanwhile appeared the Second 
Part of 'Absalom and Achitophel,' chiefly a commonplace produc- 
tion written by Nahum Tate (joint author of Tate and Brady's 
paraphrase of the Psalms into English hymn-form), but with some 
passages by Dryden. 



THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 183 

allegiance to the new rulers cost him all his public offices 
and reduced him for the rest of his life to comparative 
poverty. He had the further mortification of seeing the 
very Shadwell whom he had so unsparingly ridiculed re- 
place him as poet laureate. These reverses, however, he 
met with his characteristic manly fortitude, and of his 
position as the acknowledged head of English letters he 
could not be deprived ; his chair at ' Will 's ' coffee-house 
was the throne of an unquestioned monarch. His industry, 
also, stimulated by necessity, was unabated to the end. 
Among other work he continued, in accordance with the 
taste of the age, to make verse translations from the chief 
Latin poets, and in 1697 he brought out a version of all 
the poems of Vergil. He died in 1700, and his death may 
conveniently be taken, with substantial accuracy, as mark- 
ing the end of the Restoration period. 

Variety, fluency, and not ungraceful strength are per- 
haps the chief qualities of Dryden's work, displayed alike 
in his verse and in his prose. Since he was primarily a 
poet it is natural to speak first of his verse ; and we must 
begin with a glance at the history of the rimed pentameter 
couplet, which he carried to the highest point of effective- 
ness thus far attained. This form had been introduced 
into English, probably from French, by Chaucer, who 
used it in many thousand lines of the ' Canterbury Tales. ' 
It was employed to some extent by the Elizabethans, espe- 
cially in scattered passages of their dramas, and in some 
poems of the early seventeenth century. Up to that time 
it generally had a free form, with frequent 'running-on' 
of the sense from one line to the next and marked irregu- 
larity of pauses. The process of developing it into the 
representative pseudo-classical measure of Dryden and 
Pope consisted in making the lines, or at least the couplets, 
generally end-stopt, and in securing a general regular 
movement, mainly by eliminating pronounced pauses 
within the line, except for the frequent organic cesura in 
the middle. This process, like other pseudo-classical ten- 
dencies, was furthered by Ben Jonson, who used the couplet 
in more than half of his non-dramatic verse; but it was 
especially carried on by the wealthy politician and minor 
poet Edmund Waller (above, page 164), who for sixty 
years, from 1623 on, wrote most of his verse (no very 



184 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

great quantity) in the couplet. Dryden and all his con- 
temporaries gave to Waller, rather too unreservedly, the 
credit of having first perfected the form, that is of first 
making it (to their taste) pleasingly smooth and regular. 
The great danger of the couplet thus treated is that of over- 
great conventionality, as was partly illustrated by Dryden 's 
successor, Pope, who carried Waller 's method to the farthest 
possible limit. Dryden 's vigorous instincts largely saved 
him from this fault; by skilful variations in accents and 
pauses and by terse forcefulness of expression he gave the 
couplet firmness as well as smoothness. He employed, also, 
two other more questionable means of variety, namely, the 
insertion (not original with him) of occasional Alexan- 
drine lines and of frequent triplets, three lines instead of 
two riming together. A present-day reader may like 
the pentameter couplet or may find it frigid and tedious; 
at any rate Dryden employed it in the larger part of his 
verse and stamped it unmistakably with the strength of his 
strong personality. 

In satiric and didactic verse Dryden is accepted as the 
chief English master, and here 'Absalom and Achitophel' 
is his greatest achievement. It is formally a narrative 
poem, but in fact almost nothing happens in it ; it is really 
expository and descriptive — a very clever partisan analysis 
of a situation, enlivened by a series of the most skilful 
character sketches with very decided partisan coloring. 
The sketches, therefore, offer an interesting contrast with 
the sympathetic and humorous portraits of Chaucer's 
'Prolog.' Among the secrets of Dryden 's success in this 
particular field are his intellectual coolness, his vigorous 
masculine power of seizing on the salient points of char- 
acter, and his command of terse, biting phraseology, set 
off by effective contrast. 

Of Dryden 's numerous comedies and ' tragi-comedies ' 
(serious plays with a sub-action of comedy) it may be 
said summarily that some of them were among the best 
of their time but that they were as licentious as all the 
others. Dryden was also the chief author of another kind 
of play, peculiar to this period in England, namely the 
'Heroic' (Epic) Play. The material and spirit of these 
works came largely from the enormously long contem- 
porary French romances, which were widely read in Eng- 



THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 185 

land, and of which a prominent representative was 'The 
Great Cyrus ' of Mile, de Scudery, in ten volumes of a 
thousand pages or more apiece. These romances, carrying 
further the tendency which appears in Sidney's 'Arcadia,' 
are among the most extravagant of all products of the 
romantic imagination — strange melanges of ancient his- 
tory, medieval chivalry, pastoralism, seventeenth century 
artificial manners, and allegory of current events. The 
English 'heroic' plays, partly following along these lines, 
with influence also from Fletcher, lay their scenes in dis- 
tant countries; their central interest is extravagant ro- 
mantic love ; the action is more that of epic adventure than 
of tragedy; and incidents, situations, characters, senti- 
ments, and style, though not without power, are exag- 
gerated or overstrained to an absurd degree. Breaking 
so violently through the commonplaceness and formality of 
the age, however, they offer eloquent testimony to the ir- 
repressibility of the romantic instinct in human nature. 
Dryden's most representative play of this class is 'Alman- 
zor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada,' in two long 
five-act parts. 

We need do no more than mention two or three very 
bad adaptations of plays of Shakspere to the Restoration 
taste in which Dryden had a hand; but his most endur- 
ing dramatic work is his ' All for Love, or the World Well 
Lost,' where he treats without direct imitation, though in 
conscious rivalry, the story which Shakspere used in 
'Antony and Cleopatra.' The two plays afford an ex- 
cellent illustration of the contrast between the spirits of 
their periods. Dryden's undoubtedly has much force and 
real feeling; but he follows to a large extent the artificial 
rules of the pseudo-classical French tragedies and critics. 
He observes the 'three unities' with considerable closeness, 
and he complicates the love-action with new elements of 
Restoration jealousy and questions of formal honor. Al- 
together, the twentieth century reader finds in 'All for 
Love ' a strong and skilful play, ranking, nevertheless, with 
its somewhat formal rhetoric and conventional atmosphere, 
far below Shakspere 's less regular but magnificently emo- 
tional and imaginative masterpiece. 

A word must be added about the form of Dryden's plays. In 
his comedies and in comic portions of the others he, like other 



186 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

English, dramatists, uses prose, for its suggestion of every-day 
reality. In plays of serious tone he often turns to blank verse, and 
this is the meter of 'All for Love.' But early in his dramatic 
career he, almost contemporaneously with other dramatists, intro- 
duced the rimed couplet, especially in his heroic plays. The inno- 
vation was due in part to the influence of contemporary French 
tragedy, whose riming Alexandrine couplet is very similar in effect 
to the English couplet. About the suitability of the English 
couplet to the drama there has always been difference of critical 
opinion; but most English readers feel that it too greatly inter- 
rupts the flow of the speeches and is not capable of the dignity and 
power of blank verse. Dryden himself, at any rate, finally grew 
tired of it and returned to blank verse. 

Dryden 's work in other forms of verse, also, is of high 
quality. In his dramas he inserted songs whose lyric sweet- 
ness is reminiscent of the similar songs of Fletcher. Early 
in his career he composed (in pentameter quatrains of al- 
ternate rime, like Gray's 'Elegy') 'Annus Mirabilis' (The 
Wonderful Year — namely 1666), a long and vigorous 
though far from faultless narrative of the war with the 
Dutch and of the Great Fire of London. More important 
are the three odes in the 'irregular Pindaric' form intro- 
duced by Cowley. The first, that to Mrs. (i. e., Miss) 
Anne Killigrew, one of the Queen's maids of honor, is 
full, thanks to Cowley's example, of 'metaphysical' con- 
ceits and science. The two later ones, 'Alexander's Feast' 
and the 'Song for St. Cecilia's Day,' both written for 
a musical society's annual festival in honor of the patron 
saint of their art, are finely spirited and among the most 
striking, though not most delicate, examples of onomato- 
poeia in all poetry. 

Dryden 's prose, only less important than his verse, is 
mostly in the form of long critical essays, virtually 
the first in English, which are prefixed to many of his 
plays and poems. In them, following French example, he 
discusses fundamental questions of poetic art or of general 
esthetics. His opinions are judicious; independent, so far 
as the despotic authority of the French critics permitted, 
at least honest; and interesting. Most important, per- 
haps, is his attitude toward the French pseudo-classical 
formulas. He accepted French theory even in details 
which we now know to be absurd — agreed, for instance, 
that even Homer wrote to enforce an abstract moral 
(namely that discord destroys a state). In the field of 



THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 187 

his main interest, further, his reason was persuaded by 
the pseudo-classical arguments that English (Elizabethan) 
tragedy, with its violent contrasts and irregularity, was 
theoretically wrong. Nevertheless his greatness consists 
throughout partly in the common sense which he shares with 
the best English critics and thinkers of all periods; and 
as regards tragedy he concludes, in spite of rules and 
theory, that he 'loves Shakspere.' 

In expression, still again, Dryden did perhaps more than 
any other man to form modern prose style, a style clear, 
straightforward, terse, forceful, easy and simple and yet 
dignified, fluent in vocabulary, varied, and of pleasing 
rhythm. 

Dryden 's general quality and a large part of his 
achievement are happily summarized in Lowell's epigram 
that he 'was the greatest poet who ever was or ever could 
be made wholly out of prose.' He can never again be a 
favorite with the general reading-public ; but he will always 
remain one of the conspicuous figures in the history of 
English literature. 

The Other Dramatists. The other dramatists of the 
Restoration period may be dismissed with a few words. 
In tragedy the overdrawn but powerful plays of Thomas 
Otway, a man of short and pathetic life, and of Nathaniel 
Lee, are alone of any importance. In comedy, during the 
first part of the period, stand Sir George Etherege and 
William Wycherley. The latter 's 'Country Wife' has 
been called the most heartless play ever written. To the 
next generation and the end of the period (or rather of the 
Restoration literature, which actually lasted somewhat be- 
yond 1700), belong William Congreve, a master of spark- 
ling wit, Sir John Vanbrugh, and George Farquhar. 
So corrupt a form of writing as the Restoration comedy 
could not continue to flaunt itself indefinitely. The grow- 
ing indignation was voiced from time to time in published 
protests, of which the last, in 1698, was the over-zealous 
but powerful 'Short View of the Immorality and Pro- 
faneness of the English Stage' by Jeremy Collier, which 
carried the more weight because the author was not a 
Puritan but a High-Church bishop and partisan of the 
Stuarts. Partly as a result of such attacks and partly by 
the natural course of events the pendulum, by the end 



188 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of the period, was swinging back, and not long thereafter 
Restoration comedy died and the stage was left free for 
more decent, though, as it proved, not for greater, pro- 
ductions. 



CHAPTER IX 

PERIOD VII. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. PSEUDO- CLASSICISM 
AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN ROMANTICISM* 

Political Conditions. During the first part of the 
eighteenth century the direct connection between politics 
and literature was closer than at any previous period of 
English life ; for the practical spirit of the previous genera- 
tion continued to prevail, so that the chief writers were 
very ready to concern themselves with the affairs of State, 
and in the uncertain strife of parties ministers were glad 
to enlist their aid. On the death of King William in 1702, 
Anne, sister of his wife Queen Mary and daughter of 
James II, became Queen. Unlike King William she was a 
Tory and at first filled offices with members of that party. 
But the English campaigns under the Duke of Marlborough 
against Louis XIV were supported by the Whigs, f who 
therefore gradually regained control, and in 1708 the 
Queen had to submit to a AVhig ministry. She succeeded 
in ousting them in 1710, and a Tory cabinet was formed 
by Henry Harley (afterwards Earl of Oxford) and Henry 
St. John (afterwards Viscount Bolingbroke). On the 
death of Anne in 1714 Bolingbroke, with other Tories, was 
intriguing for a second restoration of the Stuarts in the 
person of the son of James II (the 'Old Pretender'). But 
the nation decided for a Protestant German prince, a 
descendant of James I through his daughter Elizabeth, § 
and this prince was crowned as George I — an event which 
brought England peace at the price of a century of rule 
by an unenlightened and sordid foreign dynasty. The 
Tories were violently turned out of office ; Oxford was 

* Thackeray's 'Henry Esmond' is the greatest historical novel 
relating to the early eighteenth century. 

f The Tories were the political ancestors of the present-day Con- 
servatives; the Whigs of the Liberals. 

§ The subject of Wotton's fine poem, above, p. 158. 

189 



190 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

imprisoned, and Bolingbroke, having fled to the Pretender, 
was declared a traitor. Ten years later he was allowed 
to come back and attempted to oppose Robert Walpole, the 
Whig statesman who for twenty years governed England 
in the name of the first two Georges; but in the upshot 
Bolingbroke was again obliged to retire to France. How 
closely these events were connected with the fortunes of 
the foremost authors we shall see as we proceed. 

The General Spirit of the Period. The writers of the 
reigns of Anne and George I called their period the Au- 
gustan Age, because they nattered themselves that with 
them English life and literature had reached a culminating 
period of civilization and elegance corresponding to that 
which existed at Rome under the Emperor Augustus. They 
believed also that both in the art of living and in litera- 
ture they had rediscovered and were practising the prin- 
ciples of the best periods of Greek and Roman life. In 
our own time this judgment appears equally arrogant 
and mistaken. In reality the men of the early eighteenth 
century, like those of the Restoration, largely misun- 
derstood the qualities of the classical spirit, and thinking 
to reproduce them attained only a superficial, pseudo-clas- 
sical, imitation. The main characteristics of the period 
and its literature continue, with some further development, 
those of the Restoration, and may be summarily indi- 
cated as follows: 

1. Interest was largely centered in the practical well- 
being either of society as a whole or of one's own social 
class or set. The majority of writers, furthermore, be- 
longed by birth or association to the upper social stratum 
and tended to overemphasize its artificial conventions, often 
looking with contempt on the other classes. To them con- 
ventional good breeding, fine manners, the pleasures of 
the leisure class, and the standards of 'The Town' (fash- 
ionable London society) were the only part of life much 
worth regarding. 2. The men of this age carried still 
further the distrust and dislike felt by the previous genera- 
tion for emotion, enthusiasm, and strong individuality both 
in life and in literature, and exalted Reason and Regu- 
larity as their guiding stars. The terms 'decency' and 
'neatness' were forever on their lips. They sought a con- 
ventional uniformity in manners, speech, and indeed in 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 191 

nearly everything else, and were uneasy if they deviated 
far from the approved, respectable standards of the body 
of their fellows. Great poetic imagination, therefore, could 
scarcely exist among them, or indeed supreme greatness 
of any sort. 3. They had little appreciation for external 
Nature or for any beauty except that of formalized Art. A 
forest seemed to most of them merely wild and gloomy, 
and great mountains chiefly terrible, but they took delight 
in gardens of artificially trimmed trees and in regularly 
plotted and alternating beds of domestic flowers. The 
Elizabethans also, as we have seen, had had much more 
feeling for the terror than for the grandeur of the sublime 
in Nature, but the Elizabethans had had nothing of the 
elegant primness of the Augustans. 4. In speech 
and especially in literature, most of all in poetry, they 
were given to abstractness of thought and expression, 
intended to secure elegance, but often serving largely to 
substitute superficiality for definiteness and significant 
meaning. They abounded in personifications of abstract 
qualities and ideas ('Laughter, heavenly maid,' Honor, 
Glory, Sorrow, and so on, with prominent capital letters), 
a sort of a pseudo-classical substitute for emotion. 5. They 
were still more fully confirmed than the men of the Resto- 
ration in the conviction that the ancients had attained the 
highest possible perfection in literature, and some of them 
made absolute submission of judgment to the ancients, 
especially to the Latin poets and the Greek, Latin, and also 
the seventeenth century classicizing French critics. Some 
authors seemed timidly to desire to be under authority and 
to glory in surrendering their independence, individuality, 
and originality to foreign and long-established leaders and 
principles. 6. Under these circumstances the effort to at- 
tain the finished beauty of classical literature naturally 
resulted largely in a more or less shallow formal smooth- 
ness. 7. There was a strong tendency to moralizing, which 
also was not altogether free from conventionality and 
superficiality. 

Although the 'Augustan Age' must be considered to end 
before the middle of the century, the same spirit continued 
dominant among many writers until near its close, so that 
almost the whole of the century may be called the period 
of pseudo-classicism. 



192 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Daniel Defoe. The two earliest notable writers of the 
period, however, though they display some of these char- 
acteristics, were men of strong individual traits which in 
any age would have directed them largely along paths of 
their own choosing. The first of them is Daniel Defoe, 
who belongs, furthermore, quite outside the main circle of 
high-bred and polished fashion. 

Defoe was born in London about 1660, the son of James 
Foe, a butcher, to whose name the son arbitrarily and with 
characteristic eye to effect prefixed the 'De' in middle life. 
Educated for the Dissenting ministry, Defoe, a man of 
inexhaustible practical energy, engaged instead in several 
successive lines of business, and at the age of thirty-five, 
after various vicissitudes, was in prosperous circumstances. 
He now became a pamjihleteer in support of King William 
and the Whigs. His first very significant work, a satire 
against the High- Church Tories entitled 'The Shortest 
Way with Dissenters,' belongs early in the reign of Queen 
Anne. Here, parodying extreme Tory bigotry, he argued, 
with apparent seriousness, that the Dissenters should all 
be hanged. The Tories were at first delighted, but when 
they discovered the hoax became correspondingly indig- 
nant and Defoe was set in the pillory, and (for a short 
time) imprisoned. In this confinement he began The 
Review, a newspaper which he continued for eleven years 
and whose department called 'The Scandal Club' sug- 
gested 'The Tatler' to Steele. During many years follow- 
ing his release Defoe issued an enormous number of pam- 
phlets and acted continuously as a secret agent and spy 
of the government. Though he was always at heart a 
thorough- going Dissenter and Whig, he served all the suc- 
cessive governments, Whig and Tory, alike; for his char- 
acter and point of view were those of the 'practical' jour- 
nalist and middle-class money-getter. This of course means 
that all his professed principles were superficial, or at least 
secondary, that he was destitute of real religious feeling 
and of the gentleman's sense of honor. 

Defoe's influence in helping to shape modern journalism 
and modern every-day English style was large; but the 
achievement which has given him world-wide fame came 
late in life. In 1706 he had written a masterly short 
story, 'The Apparition of Mrs, Veal.' Its real purpose, 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 193 

characteristically enough, was the concealed one of pro- 
moting the sale of an unsuccessful religious book, but its 
literary importance lies first in the extraordinarily con- 
vincing mass of minute details which it casts about an in- 
credible incident and second in the complete knowledge 
(sprung from Defoe's wide experience in journalism, poli- 
tics, and business) which it displays of a certain range 
of middle-class characters and ideas. It is these same 
elements, together with the vigorous presentation and 
emphasis of basal practical virtues, that distinguished 
'Robinson Crusoe,' of which the First Part appeared in 
1719, when Defoe was nearly or quite sixty years of age. 
The book, which must have been somewhat influenced 
by 'Pilgrim's Progress,' was more directly suggested by 
a passage in William Dampier's 'Voyage Round the 
World, ' and also, as every one knows, by the experience of 
Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who, set ashore on the island 
of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, had lived there 
alone from 1709 to 1713. Selkirk's story had been briefly 
told in the year of his return in a newspaper of Steele, 
'The Englishman'; it was later to inspire the most famous 
poem of William Cowper. 'Robinson Crusoe,' however, 
turned the material to account in a much larger, more 
clever, and more striking fashion. Its success was imme- 
diate and enormous, both with the English middle class 
and with a wider circle of readers in the other European 
countries; it was followed by numerous imitations and it 
will doubtless always continue to be one of the best known 
of world classics. The precise elements of its power can 
be briefly indicated. As a story of unprecedented adventure 
in a distant and unknown region it speaks thrillingly to 
the universal human sense of romance. Yet it makes a 
still stronger appeal to the instinct for practical, every-day 
realism which is the controlling quality in the English 
dissenting middle class for whom Defoe was writing. De- 
foe has put himself with astonishingly complete dramatic 
sympathy into the place of his hero. In spite of not a 
few errors and oversights (due to hasty composition) in 
the minor details of external fact, he has virtually lived 
Crusoe's life with him in imagination and he therefore 
makes the reader also pass with Crusoe through all his 
experiences, his fears, hopes and doubts. Here also, as 



194 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

we have implied, Defoe's vivid sense for external minutiae 
plays an important part. He tells precisely how many 
guns and cheeses and flasks of spirit Crusoe brought away 
from the wreck, how many days or weeks he spent in 
making his earthen vessels and his canoe — in a word, 
thoroughly actualizes the whole story. More than this, the 
book strikes home to the English middle class because it 
records how a plain Englishman completely mastered ap- 
parently insuperable obstacles through the plain virtues 
of courage, patience, perseverance, and mechanical inge- 
nuity. Further, it directly addresses the dissenting con- 
science in its emphasis on religion and morality. This is 
none the less true because the religion and morality are of 
the shallow sort characteristic of Defoe, a man who, like 
Crusoe, would have had no scruples about selling into 
slavery a dark-skinned boy who had helped him to escape 
from the same condition. Of any really delicate or poetic 
feeling, any appreciation for the finer things of life, the 
book has no suggestion. In style, like Defoe's other writ- 
ings, it is straightforward and clear, though colloquially 
informal, with an entire absence of pretense or affectation. 
Structurally, it is a characteristic story of adventure — a 
series of loosely connected experiences not unified into an 
organic plot, and with no stress on character and little 
treatment of the really complex relations and struggles 
between opposing characters and groups of characters. 
Yet it certainly marks a step in the development of the 
modern novel, as will be indicated in the proper place 
(below, p. 254). 

Defoe's energy had not diminished with age and a hard 
life, and the success of ' Robinson Crusoe' led him to pour 
out a series of other works of romantic-realistic fiction. 
The second part of 'Robinson Crusoe' is no more satisfac- 
tory than any other similar continuation, and the third 
part, a collection of moralizings, is to-day entirely and 
properly forgotten. On the other hand, his usual method, 
the remarkable imaginative re-creation and vivifying of 
a host of minute details, makes of the fictitious 'Journal 
of the Plague Year' (1666) a piece of virtual history. 
Defoe's other later works are rather unworthy attempts 
to make profit out of his reputation and his full knowledge 
of the worst aspects of life; they are mostly very frank 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 195 

presentations of the careers of adventurers or criminals, 
real or fictitious. In this coarse realism they are picaresque 
(above, p. 108), and in structure also they, like 'Robinson 
Crusoe, ' are picaresque in being mere successions of adven- 
tures without artistic plot. 

In Defoe's last years he suffered a great reverse of for- 
tune, paying the full penalty for his opportunism and lack 
of ideals. His secret and unworthy long-standing connec- 
tion with the Government was disclosed, so that his repu- 
tation was sadly blemished, and he seems to have gone into 
hiding, perhaps as the result of half -insane delusions. He 
died in 1731. His place in English literature is secure, 
though he owes it to the lucky accident of finding not 
quite too late special material exactly suited to his pe- 
culiar talent. 

Jonathan Swift. Jonathan Swift, another unique fig- 
ure of very mixed traits, is like Defoe in that he connects 
the reign of William III with that of his successors and 
that, in accordance with the spirit of his age, he wrote 
for the most part not for literary but for practical pur- 
poses ; in many other respects the two are widely different. 
Swift is one of the best representatives in English litera- 
ture of sheer intellectual power, but his character, his 
aims, his environment, and the circumstances of his life 
denied to him also literary achievement of the greatest 
permanent significance. Swift, though of unmixed Eng- 
lish descent, related to both Dryden and Robert Herrick, 
was born in Ireland, in 1667. Brought up in poverty by 
his widowed mother, lie spent the period between his four- 
teenth and twentieth years recklessly and without dis- 
tinction at Trinity College, Dublin. From the outbreak 
attending the Revolution of 1688 he fled to England, where 
for the greater part of nine years he lived in the country 
as a sort of secretary to the retired statesman, Sir Wil- 
liam Temple, who was his distant relative by marriage. 
Here he had plenty of time for reading, but the position 
of dependence and the consciousness that his great though 
still unformed powers of intellect and of action were rust- 
ing away in obscurity undoubtedly did much to increase 
the natural bitterness of his disposition. As the result 
of a quarrel he left Temple for a time and took holy 
orders, and on the death of Temple he returned to Ireland 



196 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

as chaplain to the English Lord Deputy. He was eventu- 
ally given several small livings and other church positions 
in and near Dublin, and at one of these. Laracor, he made 
his home for another nine years. During all this period 
and later the .Miss Esther .Johnson whom he has immor- 
talized as 'Stella' holds a prominent place in his life. 
A girl of technically gentle birth, she also had been a 
member of Sir William Temple's household, was infatu- 
ated with Swift, and followed him to Ireland. About their 
intimacy there has always hung a mystery. It has been 
held that after many years they were secretly married, 
but this is probably a mistake ; the essential fact seems to 
be that Swift, with characteristic selfishness, was willing 
to sacrifice any other possible prospects of 'Stella' to his 
own mere enjoyment of her society. It is certain, however, 
that he both highly esteemed her and reciprocated her af- 
fection so far as it was possible for him to love any woman. 

In 1704 Swift published his first important works (writ- 
ten earlier, while he w r as living with Temple), which are 
among the masterpieces of his satirical genius. In 'The 
Battle of the Books' he supports Temple, who had taken 
the side of the Ancients in a hotly-debated and very futile 
quarrel then being carried on by French and English 
writers as to whether ancient or modern authors are the 
greater. ' The Tale of a Tub ' is a keen, coarse, and violent 
satire on the actual irreligion of all Christian Churches. 
It takes the form of a burlesque history of three brothers, 
Peter (the Catholics, so called from St. Peter), Martin 
(the Lutherans and the Church of England, named from 
Martin Luther), and Jack (the Dissenters, who followed 
John Calvin) ; but a great part of the book is made up 
of irrelevant introductions and digressions in which Swift 
ridicules various absurdities, literary and otherwise, among 
them the very practice of digressions. 

Swift's instinctive dominating impulse was personal am- 
bition, and during this period he made long visits to Lon- 
don, attempting to push his fortunes with the Whig states- 
men, who were then growing in power ; attempting, that is, 
to secure a higher position in the Church; also, be it 
added, to get relief for the ill-treated English Church in 
Ireland. He made the friendship of Addison, who called 
him, perhaps rightly, 'the greatest genius of the age,' and 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 197 

of Steele, but he failed of his main purposes; and when 
in 1710 the Tories replaced the Whigs he accepted their 
solicitations and devoted his pen, already somewhat ex- 
perienced in pamphleteering, to their service. It should 
not be overlooked that up to this time, when he was already 
more than forty years of age, his life had been one of 
continual disappointment, so that he was already greatly 
soured. Now, in conducting a paper, ' The Examiner, ' and 
in writing masterly political pamphlets, he found occu- 
pation for his tremendous energy and gave very vital help 
to the ministers. During the four years of their control of 
the government he remained in London on intimate terms 
with them, especially with Bolingbroke and Harley, ex- 
ercising a very large advisory share in the bestowal of 
places of all sorts and in the general conduct of affairs. 
This was Swift's proper sphere; in the realization and 
exercise of power he took a fierce and deep delight. His 
bearing at this time too largely reflected the less pleasant 
side of his nature, especially his pride and arrogance. Yet 
toward professed inferiors he could be kind ; and real play- 
fulness and tenderness, little evident in most of his other 
writings, distinguish his 'Journal to Stella,' which he 
wrote for her with affectionate regularity, generally every 
day, for nearly three years. The 'Journal' is interesting 
also for its record of the minor details of the life of Swift 
and of London in his day. His association, first and last, 
with literary men was unusually broad; when politics es- 
tranged him from Steele and Addison he drew close to 
Pope and other Tory writers in what they called the Scrib- 
lerus Club. 

Despite his political success, Swift was still unable to 
secure the definite object of his ambition, a bishopric in 
England, since the levity with which he had treated holy 
things in 'A Tale of a Tub' had hopelessly prejudiced 
Queen Anne against him and the ministers could not act 
altogether in opposition to her wishes. In 1713 he re- 
ceived the unwelcome gift of the deanship of St. Patrick's 
Cathedral in Dublin, and the next year, when the Queen 
died and the Tory ministry fell, he withdrew to Dublin, as 
he himself bitterly said, 'to die like a poisoned rat in a 
hole.' 

In Swift's personal life there were now events in which 



198 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

he again showed to very little advantage. In London he 
had become acquainted with a certain Hester Vanhomrigh, 
the 'Vanessa' of his longest poem, 'Cadenus and Vanessa' 
(in which 'Cadenus' is an anagram of 'Decanus,' Latin 
for 'Dean,' i. e., Swift). Miss Vanhomrigh, like 'Stella,' 
was infatuated with Swift, and like her followed him to 
Ireland, and for nine years, as has been said, he 'lived a 
double life' between the two. 'Vanessa' then died, prob- 
ably of a broken heart, and 'Stella' a few years later. 
Over against this conduct, so far as it goes, may be set 
Swift's quixotic but extensive and constant personal be- 
nevolence and generosity to the poor. 

In general, this last period of Swift's life amounted to 
thirty years of increasing bitterness. He devoted some of 
his very numerous pamphlets to defending the Irish, and 
especially the English who formed the governing class in 
Ireland, against oppression by England. Most important 
here were 'The Drapier's [i.e., Draper's, Cloth-Mer- 
chant's] Letters,' in which Swift aroused the country to 
successful resistance against a very unprincipled piece of 
political jobbery whereby a certain Englishman was to be 
allowed to issue a debased copper coinage at enormous 
profit to himself but to the certain disaster of Ireland. 'A 
Modest Proposal,' the proposal, namely, that the misery 
of the poor in Ireland should be alleviated by the raising 
of children for food, like pigs, is one of the most powerful, 
as well as one of the most horrible, satires which ever is- 
sued from any human imagination. In 1726 (seven years 
after 'Robinson Crusoe') appeared Swift's masterpiece, 
the only one of his works still widely known, namely, ' The 
Travels of Lemuel Gulliver.' The remarkable power of 
this unique work lies partly in its perfect combination of 
two apparently inconsistent things, first, a story of mar- 
velous adventure which must always remain (in the first 
parts) one of the most popular of children's classics; and 
second, a bitter satire against mankind. The intensity of 
the satire increases as the work proceeds. In the first voy- 
age, that to the Lilliputians, the tone is one mainly of 
humorous irony; but in such passages as the hideous de- 
scription of the Struldbrugs in the third voyage the cynical 
contempt is unspeakably painful, and from the distorted 
libel on mankind in the Yahoos of the fourth voyage a 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 199 

reader recoils in indignant disgust. 

During these years Swift corresponded with friends in 
England, among them Pope, whom he bitterly urged to 
'lash the world for his sake,' and he once or twice visited 
England in the hope, even then, of securing a place in 
the Church on the English side of St. George's Channel. 
His last years were melancholy in the extreme. Long 
before, on noticing a dying tree, he had observed, with the 
pitiless incisiveness which would spare neither others nor 
himself: 'I am like that. I shall die first at the top.' 
His birthday he was accustomed to celebrate with lamen- 
tations. At length an obscure disease which had always 
afflicted him, fed in part, no doubt, by his fiery spirit and 
his fiery discontent, reached his brain. After some years 
of increasing lethargy and imbecility, occasionally varied 
by fits of violent madness and terrible pain, he died in 
1745, leaving all his money to found a hospital for the 
insane. His grave in St. Patrick's Cathedral bears this 
inscription of his own composing, the best possible epitome 
of his career : ' Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare 
nequit' (Where fierce indignation can no longer tear his 
heart). 

The complexity of Swift's character and the great dif- 
ference between the viewpoints of his age and of ours 
make it easy at the present time to judge him with too 
great harshness. Apart from his selfish egotism and his 
bitterness, his nature was genuinely loyal, kind and tender 
to friends and connections ; and he hated injustice and the 
more flagrant kinds of hypocrisy with a sincere and irre- 
pressible violence. Whimsicalness and a contemptuous 
sort of humor were as characteristic of him as biting sar- 
casm, and his conduct and writings often veered rapidly 
from the one to the other in a way puzzling to one who 
does not understand him. Nevertheless he was dominated 
by cold intellect and an instinct for the practical. To 
show sentiment, except under cover, he regarded as a 
weakness, and it is said that when he was unable to con- 
trol it he would retire from observation. He was ready 
to serve mankind to the utmost of his power when effort 
seemed to him of any avail, and at times he sacrificed even 
his ambition to his convictions; but he had decided that 
the mass of men were hopelessly foolish, corrupt, and in- 



200 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ferior, personal sympathy with them was impossible to 
him, and his contempt often took the form of sardonic 
practical jokes, practised sometimes on a whole city. Says 
Sir Leslie Stephen in his life of Swift: 'His doctrine was 
that virtue is the one thing which deserves love and ad- 
miration, and yet that virtue in this hideous chaos of a 
world involves misery and decay.' Of his extreme ar- 
rogance and brutality to those who offended him there are 
numerous anecdotes ; not least in the case of women, whom 
he, like most men of his age, regarded as man's inferiors. 
He once drove a lady from her own parlor in tears by 
violent insistence that she should sing, against her will, and 
when he next met her, inquired, ' Pray, madam, are you as 
proud and ill-natured to-day as when I saw you last?' 
It seems, indeed, that throughout his life Swift's mind was 
positively abnormal, and this may help to excuse the re- 
pulsive elements in his writings. For metaphysics and 
abstract principles, it may be added, he had a bigoted an- 
tipathy. In religion he was a staunch and sincere High 
Churchman, but it was according to the formal fashion of 
many thinkers of his day; he looked on the Church not 
as a medium of spiritual life, of which he, like his gen- 
eration, had little conception, but as one of the organized 
institutions of society, useful in maintaining decency and 
order. 

Swift's 'poems' require only passing notice. In any 
strict sense they are not poems at all, since they are en- 
tirely bare of imagination, delicacy, and beauty. Instead 
they exhibit the typical pseudo-classical traits of matter- 
of-factness and clearness; also, as Swift's personal notes, 
cleverness, directness, trenchant intellectual power, irony, 
and entire ease, to which latter the prevailing octosyllabic 
couplet meter contributes. This is the meter of 'L 'Allegro' 
and 'II Penseroso,' and the contrast between these poems 
and Swift's is instructive. 

Swift's prose style has substantially the same qualities. 
Writing generally as a man of affairs, for practical ends, 
he makes no attempt at elegance and is informal even to 
the appearance of looseness of expression. Of conscious 
refinements and also, in his stories, of technical artistic 
structural devices, he has no knowledge; he does not go 
out of the straight path in order to create suspense, he 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 201 

does not always explain difficulties of detail, and some- 
times his narrative becomes crudely bare. He often dis- 
plays the greatest imaginative power, but it is always a 
practical imagination; his similes, for example, are always 
from very matter-of-fact things. But more notable are his 
positive merits. He is always absolutely clear, direct, and 
intellectually forceful; in exposition and argument he is 
cumulatively irresistible ; in description and narration real- 
istically picturesque and fascinating; and he has the nat- 
ural instinct for narration which gives vigorous movement 
and climax. Indignation and contempt often make his 
style burn with passion, and humor, fierce or bitterly mirth- 
ful, often enlivens it with startling flashes. 

The great range of the satires which make the greater 
part of Swift's work is supported in part by variety of 
satiric method. Sometimes he pours out a savage direct 
attack. Sometimes, in a long ironical statement, he says 
exactly the opposite of what he really means to suggest. 
Sometimes he uses apparently logical reasoning where 
either, as in 'A Modest Proposal,' the proposition, or, as 
in the 'Argument Against Abolishing Christianity,' the 
arguments are absurd. He often shoots out incidental 
humorous or satirical shafts. But his most important and 
extended method is that of allegory. The pigmy size of 
the Lilliputians symbolizes the littleness of mankind and 
their interests; the superior skill in rope-dancing which 
with them is the ground for political advancement, the 
political intrigues of real men; and the question whether 
eggs shall be broken on the big or the little end, which has 
embroiled Lilliput in a bloody war, both civil and foreign, 
the trivial causes of European conflicts. In Brobdingnag, 
on the other hand, the coarseness of mankind is exhibited 
by the magnifying process, Swift, like Defoe, generally 
increases the verisimilitude of his fictions and his ironies 
by careful accuracy in details, which is sometimes arith- 
metically genuine, sometimes only a hoax. In Lilliput all 
the dimensions are scientifically computed on a scale one- 
twelfth as large as that of man; in Brobdingnag, by an 
exact reversal, everything is twelve times greater than 
among men. But the long list of technical nautical terms 
which seem to make a spirited narrative at the beginning 
of the second of Gulliver's voyages is merely an incoherent 



202 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

hodge-podge. 

Swift, then, is the greatest of English satirists and the 
only one who as a satirist claims large attention in a brief 
general snrvey of English literature. He is one of the 
most powerfully intellectual of all English writers, and 
the clear force of his work is admirable; but being first a 
man of affairs and only secondarily a man of letters, he 
stands only on the outskirts of real literature. In his 
character the elements were greatly mingled, and in our 
final judgment of him there must be combined something 
of disgust, something of admiration, and not a little of 
sympathy and pity. 

Steele and Addison and 'The Tatler' and 'The Spec- 
tator.' The writings of Steele and Addison, of which the 
most important are their essays in 'The Tatler' and 'The 
Spectator,' contrast strongly with the work of Swift and 
are more broadly characteristic of the pseudo- classical 
period. 

Richard Steele was born in Dublin in 1672 of an Eng- 
lish father and an Irish mother. The Irish strain was 
conspicuous throughout his life in his warm-heartedness, 
impulsiveness and lack of self-control and practical judg- 
ment. Having lost his father early, he was sent to the 
Charterhouse School in London, where he made the ac- 
quaintance of Addison, and then to Oxford. He aban- 
doned the university to enlist in the aristocratic regiment 
of Life Guards, and he remained in the army, apparently, 
for seven or eight years, though he seems not to have been in 
active service and became a recognized wit at the London 
coffee-houses. Thackeray in 'Henry Esmond' gives inter- 
esting though freely imaginative pictures of him at this 
stage of his career and later. His reckless instincts and 
love of pleasure were rather strangely combined with a 
sincere theoretical devotion to religion, and his first no- 
ticeable work (1701), a little booklet called 'The Christian 
Hero,' aimed, in opposition to fashionable license, to show 
that decency and goodness are requisites of a real gentle- 
man. The resultant ridicule forced him into a duel (in 
which he seriously wounded his antagonist), and thence- 
forth in his writings duelling was a main object of his 
attacks. During the next few years he turned with the 
same reforming zeal to comedy, where he attempted to 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 203 

exalt pure love and high ideals, though the standards of 
his age and class leave in his own plays much that to-day 
seems coarse. Otherwise his plays are by no means great ; 
they initiated the weak 'Sentimental Comedy,' which 
largely dominated the English stage for the rest of the cen- 
tury. During this period Steele was married twice in 
rather rapid succession to wealthy ladies whose fortunes 
served only very temporarily to respite him from his 
chronic condition of debt and bailiff's duns. 

Now succeeds the brief period of his main literary 
achievement. All his life a strong "Whig, he was appointed 
in 1707 Gazetteer, or editor, of 'The London Gazette,' the 
official government newspaper. This led him in 1709 to 
start 'The Tatler. ' English periodical literature, in forms 
which must be called the germs both of the modern news- 
paper and of the modern magazine, had begun in an un- 
certain fashion, of which the details are too complicated 
for record here, nearly a hundred years before, and had 
continued ever since with increasing vigor. The lapsing 
of the licensing laws in 1695 had given a special impetus. 
Defoe's 'Review,' from 1704 to 1713, was devoted to many 
interests, including politics, the Church and commerce. 
Steele 's ' Tatler ' at first likewise dealt in each number with 
several subjects, such as foreign news, literary criticism, 
and morals, but his controlling instinct to inculcate vir- 
tue and good sense more and more asserted itself. The 
various departments were dated from the respective cof- 
fee-houses where those subjects were chiefly discussed, 
Poetry from 'Will's,' Foreign and Domestic News from 
'St. James's,' and so on. The more didactic papers were 
ascribed to an imaginary Isaac Bickerstaff, a nom-de-plume 
which Steele borrowed from some of Swift's satires. Steele 
himself wrote two-thirds of all the papers, but before pro- 
ceeding far he accepted Addison's offer of assistance and 
later he occasionally called in other contributors. 

'The Tatler' appeared three times a week and ran for 
twenty- one months ; it came to an end shortly after the 
return of the Tories to power had deprived Steele and Ad- 
dison of some of their political offices. Its discontinuance 
may have been due to weariness on Steele's part or, since 
it was Whig in tone, to a desire to be done with partisan 
writing; at any rate, two months later, in March, 1711, 



204 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Steele and Addison together virtually restored it, minus 
the political element, by beginning 'The Spectator.' Each 
number of 'The Spectator' consisted, like the later 'Tat- 
lers,' of a single essay on some one theme, but 'The Spec- 
tator' appeared every week-day. It quickly attained great 
popularity and a circulation, very large for the time, of 
probably ten thousand copies. Addison's share in 'The 
Spectator' was more important than Steele's, especially in 
quality. He wrote nearly half the papers, Steele some- 
what fewer, the rest being again distributed among other 
collaborators. 'The Spectator' also continued for twenty- 
one months, after which, in 1713, it was replaced for a 
few months by the partisan 'Guardian.' 

The rest of Steele's life was broken and unsatisfactory. 
In 'The Guardian' and the next of numerous later short- 
lived papers he carried on a controversy with Swift, who 
wrote in his 'Examiner,' and he attacked the government; 
when he was elected to Parliament he was expelled by the 
Tory majority for 'seditious' writings. On the death of 
Queen Anne and the return of the Whigs to power he was 
made manager of Drury Lane theater, again elected to 
Parliament, and knighted. Later he quarreled with Ad- 
dison on a political question — a quarrel still unreconciled 
at Addison's death. His most important play, 'The Con- 
scious Lovers,' belongs to 1722. Eventually his debts 
drove him from London, and he partly lost his mind. He 
died in 1729. 

Very different from the irregular character of Steele 
was that of his collaborator, Joseph Addison, classically 
dignified and refined, and also reserved and timid. Addi- 
son, the son of a clergyman, was born, like Steele, in 1672. 
He spent twelve years in systematic study, as undergradu- 
ate and Fellow, at Oxford, where he wrote much verse, 
especially in Latin. He won the favor of Charles Monta- 
gue (later Earl of Halifax) by including him in a poem 
on 'The Greatest English Poets,' and of the government 
as a whole by another on 'The Peace of Ryswick. ' The 
result was a pension which enabled him to travel and study 
abroad for four years in preparation for a political ca- 
reer. The fall of the Whigs on the death of King William 
temporarily dashed his prospects and reduced him to 
poverty, but in 1704 a poem, ' The Campaign, ' on the Duke 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY 205 

of Marlborough 's victory at Blenheim, secured the favor of 
the ministers of the day, and throughout almost all the 
rest of his life he held important political places, some 
even, thanks to Swift, during the period of Tory domi- 
nance. During his last ten years he was a member of 
Parliament ; but though he was a delightful conversational- 
ist in a small group of friends, he was unable to speak in 
public. 

Addison's great fame as 'The Spectator' was increased 
when in 1713 he brought out the play 'Cato,' mostly 
written years before. This is a characteristic example of 
the pseudo- classical tragedies of which a few were pro- 
duced during the first half of the eighteenth century. 
They are the stiffest and most lifeless of all forms of pseudo- 
classical literature; Addison, for his part, attempts not 
only to observe the three unities, but to follow many of 
the minor formal rules drawn up by the French critics, 
and his plot, characterization, and language are alike ex- 
cessively pale and frigid. Paleness and frigidity, how- 
ever, were taken for beauties at the time, and the moral 
idea of the play, the eulogy of Cato's devotion to liberty in 
his opposition to Csesar, was very much in accord with the 
prevailing taste, or at least the prevailing affected taste. 
Both political parties loudly claimed the work as an expres- 
sion of their principles, the Whigs discovering in Csesar an 
embodiment of arbitrary government like that of tihe 
Tories, the Tories declaring him a counterpart of Marl- 
borough, a dangerous plotter, endeavoring to establish a 
military despotism. ' Cato, ' further, was a main cause of a 
famous quarrel between Addison and Pope. Addison, 
now recognized as the literary dictator of the age, had 
greatly pleased Pope, then a young aspirant for fame, by 
praising his 'Essay on Criticism,' and Pope rendered con- 
siderable help in the final revision of 'Cato.' When John 
Dennis, a rather clumsy critic, attacked the play, Pope 
came to its defense with a reply written in a spirit of 
railing bitterness which sprang from injuries of his own. 
Addison, a real gentleman, disowned the defense, and 
this, with other slights suffered or imagined by Pope's 
jealous disposition, led to estrangement and soon to the 
composition of Pope's very clever and telling satire on 
Addison as 'Atticus,' which Pope did not publish, how- 



206 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ever, until he included it in his ' Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, ' 
many years after Addison's death. 

The few remaining years of Addison's life were rather 
unhappy. He married the widowed Countess of Warwick 
and attained a place in the Ministry as one of the Secre- 
taries of State ; but his marriage was perhaps incompatible 
and his quarrel with Steele was regrettable. He died in 
1719 at the age of only forty-seven, perhaps the most gen- 
erally respected and beloved man of his time. On his 
deathbed, with a somewhat self-conscious virtue character- 
istic both of himself and of the period, he called his step- 
son to come and 'see in what peace a Christian could die.' 

'The Tatler' and the more important 'Spectator' accom- 
plished two results of main importance : they developed the 
modern essay as a comprehensive and fluent discussion of 
topics of current interest ; and they performed a very great 
service in elevating the tone of English thought and life. 
The later 'Tatlers' and all the 'Spectators' dealt, by di- 
verse methods, with a great range of themes — amusements, 
religion, literature, art, dress, clubs, superstitions, and in 
general all the fashions and follies of the time. The 
writers, especially Addison, with his wide and mature 
scholarship, aimed to form public taste. But the chief 
purpose of the papers, professedly, was ' to banish Vice and 
Ignorance' (though here also, especially in Steele's papers, 
the tone sometimes seems to twentieth-century readers far 
from unexceptionable). "When the papers began to appear, 
in spite of some weakening of the Restoration spirit, the 
idea still dominated, or was allowed to appear dominant, 
that immorality and lawlessness were the proper marks 
of a gentleman. The influence of the papers is thus sum- 
marized by the poet Gray: 'It would have been a jest, 
some time since, for a man to have asserted that anything 
witty could be said in praise of a married state or that 
Devotion and Virtue were in any way necessary to the 
character of a fine gentleman. . . . Instead of complying 
with the false sentiments or vicious tastes of the age he 
[Steele] has boldly assured them that they were alto- 
gether in the wrong. ... It is incredible to conceive the 
effect his writings have had upon the Town; how many 
thousand follies they have either quite banished or given 
a very great check to! how much countenance they have 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 207 

added to Virtue and Religion! how many people they 
have rendered happy by showing them it was their own 
faults if they were not so.' 

An appeal was made, also, to women no less than to 
men. During the previous period woman, in fashionable 
circles, had been treated as an elegant toy, of whom noth- 
ing was expected but to be frivolously attractive. Addison 
and Steele held up to her the ideal of self-respecting in- 
tellectual development and of reasonable preparation for 
her own particular sphere. 

The great effectiveness of 'The Spectator's' preaching 
was due largely to its tactfulness. The method was never 
violent denunciation, rather gentle admonition, suggestion 
by example or otherwise, and light or humorous raillery. 
Indeed, this almost uniform urbanity and good-nature 
makes the chief charm of the papers. Their success was 
largely furthered, also, by the audience provided in the 
coffee-houses, virtually eighteenth century middle-class 
clubs whose members and points of view they primarily 
addressed. 

The external style has been from the first an object 
of unqualified and well-merited praise. Both the chief 
authors are direct, sincere, and lifelike, and the many short 
sentences which they mingle with the longer, balanced, ones 
give point and force. Steele is on the whole somewhat 
more colloquial and less finished, Addison more balanced 
and polished, though without artificial formality. Dr. 
Johnson's repeatedly quoted description of the style can 
scarcely be improved on — 'familiar but not coarse, and 
elegant but not ostentatious.' 

It still remains to speak of one particular achievement 
of 'The Spectator,' namely the development of the charac- 
ter-sketch, accomplished by means of the series of De C ov- 
erly papers, scattered at intervals among the others. This 
was important because it signified preparation for the 
modern novel with its attention to character as well as 
action. The character-sketch as a distinct form began 
with the Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, of the third 
century B. C, who struck off with great skill brief hu- 
morous pictures of typical figures — the Dissembler, the 
Flatterer, the Coward, and so on. This sort of writing, 
in one form or another, was popular in Prance and Eng- 



208 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

land in the seventeenth century. From it Steele, and fol- 
lowing him Addison, really derived the idea for their 
portraits of Sir Roger, AA 7 ill Honeycomb, Will Wimble, 
and the other members of the De Coverly group ; but in 
each case they added individuality to the type traits. 
Students should consider how complete the resulting char- 
acterizations are, and in general just what additions and 
changes in all respects would be needed to transform the 
De Coverly papers into a novel of the nineteenth century 
type. 

Alexander Pope, 1688-1744. The chief representative 
of pseudo-classicism in its most particular field, that of 
poetry, is Dryden's successor, Alexander Pope. 

Pope was born in 1688 (just a hundred years before 
Byron), the son of a Catholic linen-merchant in London. 
Scarcely any other great writer has ever had to contend 
against such hard and cruel handicaps as he. He 
inherited a deformed and dwarfed body and an incur- 
ably sickly constitution, which carried with it abnor- 
mal sensitiveness of both nerves and mind. Though he 
never had really definite religious convictions of his own, 
he remained all his life formally loyal to his parents' faith, 
and under the laws of the time this closed to him all the 
usual careers of a gentleman. But he was predestined by 
Nature to be a poet. Brought up chiefly at the country 
home near Windsor to which his father had retired, and 
left to himself for mental training, he never acquired any 
thoroughness of knowledge or power of systematic thought, 
but he read eagerly the poetry of many languages. He was 
one of the most precocious of the long list of precocious 
versifiers; his own words are: 'I lisped in numbers, for 
the numbers came.' The influences which would no doubt 
have determined his style in any case were early brought 
to a focus in the advice given him by an amateur poet and 
critic, William Walsh. Walsh declared that England had 
had great poets, 'but never one great poet that was cor- 
rect' (that is of thoroughly regular style). Pope accepted 
this hint as his guiding principle and proceeded to seek 
correctness by giving still further polish to the pentameter 
couplet of Dryden. 

At the age of twenty-one, when he was already on 
familiar terms with prominent literary men, he pub- 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 209 

lished some imitative pastorals, and two years later his 
'Essay on Criticism.' This work is thoroughly represen- 
tative both of Pope and of his period. In the first place the 
subject is properly one not for poetry but for expository 
prose. In the second place the substance is not original 
with Pope but is a restatement of the ideas of the Greek 
Aristotle, the Roman Horace, especially of the French 
critic Boileau, who was Pope's earlier contemporary, and 
of various other critical authorities, French and English. 
But in terse and epigrammatic expression of fundamental 
or pseudo-classical principles of poetic composition and 
criticism the 'Essay' is amazingly brilliant, and it shows 
Pope already a consummate master of the couplet. The 
reputation which it brought him was very properly in- 
creased by the publication the next year of the admirable 
mock-epic 'The Rape of the Lock,' which Pope soon im- 
proved, against Addison's advice, by the delightful 'ma- 
chinery' of the Rosicrucian sylphs. In its adaptation of 
means to ends and its attainment of its ends Lowell has 
boldly called this the most successful poem in English. 
Pope now formed his lifelong friendship with Swift (who 
was twice his age), with Bolingbroke, and other distin- 
guished persons, and at twenty-five or twenty-six found 
himself acknowledged as the chief man of letters in Eng- 
land, with a wide European reputation. 

For the next dozen years he occupied himself chiefly 
with the formidable task (suggested, no doubt, by Dry- 
den's 'Virgil,' but expressive also of the age) of trans- 
lating 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey.' 'The Iliad' he 
completed unaided, but then, tiring of the drudgery, he 
turned over half of 'The Odyssey' to two minor writers. 
So easy, however, was his style to catch that if the facts 
were not on record the work of his assistants would gen- 
erally be indistinguishable from his own. From an abso- 
lute point of view many criticisms must be made of Pope 's 
version. That he knew little Greek when he began the 
work and from first to last depended much on transla- 
tions would in itself have made his rendering inaccurate. 
Moreover, the noble but direct and simple spirit and 
language of Homer were as different as possible from the 
spirit and language of the London drawing-rooms for which 
Pope wrote; hence he not only expands, as every author 



210 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

* of a verse-translation must do in filling out his lines, but 
inserts new ideas of his own and continually substitutes 
for Homer's expressions the periphrastic and, as he held, 
elegant ones of the pseudo-classic diction. The polished 
rimed couplet, also, pleasing as its precision and smooth- 
ness are for a while, becomes eventually monotonous to 
most readers of a romantic period. Equally serious is the 
inability which Pope shared with most of the men of his 
time to understand the culture of the still half-barbarous 
Homeric age. He supposes (in his Preface) that it was 
by a deliberate literary artifice that Homer introduced the 
gods into his action, supposes, that is, that Homer no 
more believed in the Greek gods than did he, Pope, him- 
self ; and in general Pope largely obliterates the differences 
between the Homeric warrior-chief and the eighteenth cen- 
tury gentleman. The force of all this may be realized 
by comparing Pope 's translation with the very sympathetic 
and skilful one made (in prose) in our own time by 
Messrs. Lang, Leaf, and Myers. A criticism of Pope's 
work which Pope never forgave but which is final in some 
aspects was made by the great Cambridge professor, Bent- 
ley: 'It's a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not 
call it Homer.' Yet after all, Pope merited much higher 
praise than this, and his work was really a great achieve- 
ment. It has been truly said that every age must have 
the great classics translated into its own dialect, and this 
work could scarcely have been better done for the early 
eighteenth century than it is done by Pope. 

The publication of Pope's Homer marks an important 
stage in the development of authorship. Until the time 
of Dryden no writer had expected to earn his whole living 
by publishing works of real literature. The medieval min- 
strels and romancers of the higher class and the dramatists 
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had indeed sup- 
ported themselves largely or wholly by their works, but 
not by printing them. When, in Dryden 's time, with the 
great enlargement of the reading public, conditions were 
about to change, the publisher took the upper hand; 
authors might sometimes receive gifts from the noblemen to 
whom they inscribed dedications, but for their main re- 
turns they must generally- sell their works outright to the 
publisher and accept his price. Pope's ' Iliad' and 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 211 

'Odyssey' afforded the first notably successful instance 
of another method, that of publication by subscription — 
individual purchasers at a generous price being secured 
beforehand by solicitation and in acknowledgment having 
their names printed in a conspicuous list in the front of 
the book. Prom the two Homeric poems together, thanks 
to this device, Pope realized a profit of nearly £9000, and 
thus proved that an author might be independent of the 
publisher. On the success of 'The Iliad' alone Pope had 
retired to an estate at a London suburb, Twickenham 
(then pronounced 'Twitnam'), where he spent the re- 
mainder of his life. Here he laid out five acres with 
skill, though in the formal landscape-garden taste of his 
time. In particular, he excavated under the road a 
'grotto,' which he adorned with mirrors and glittering 
stones and which was considered by his friends, or at 
least by himself, as a marvel of artistic beauty. 

Only bare mention need here be made of Pope's edition 
of Shakspere, prepared with his usual hard work but 
with inadequate knowledge and appreciation, and pub- 
lished in 1725. His next production, 'The Dunciad,' can 
be understood only in the light of his personal character. 
Somewhat like Swift, Pope was loyal and kind to his 
friends and inoffensive to persons against whom he did 
not conceive a prejudice. He was an unusually faithful 
son, and, in a brutal age, a hater of physical brutality. 
But, as we have said, his infirmities and hardships had 
sadly warped his disposition and he himself spoke of 
'that long disease, my life.' He was proud, vain, ab- 
normally sensitive, suspicious, quick to imagine an in- 
jury, incredibly spiteful, implacable in resentment, appar- 
ently devoid of any sense of honesty — at his worst hateful 
and petty-minded beyond any other man in English litera- 
ture. His trickiness was astonishing. Dr. Johnson ob- 
serves that he ' hardly drank tea without a stratagem, ' and 
indeed he seems to have been almost constitutionally un- 
able to do anything in an open and straightforward way. 
Wishing, for example, to publish his correspondence, he 
not only falsified it, but to preserve an appearance of 
modesty engaged in a remarkably complicated series of 
intrigues by which he trapped a publisher into apparently 
stealing a part of it — and then loudly protested at the 



212 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

theft and the publication. It is easy to understand, there- 
fore, that Pope was readily drawn into quarrels and 
was not an agreeable antagonist. He had early taken a 
violent antipathy to the host of poor scribblers who are 
known by the name of the residence of most of them, 
Grub Street — an antipathy chiefly based, it would seem, 
on his contempt for their worldly and intellectual poverty. 
For some years he had been carrying on a pamphlet war 
against them, and now, it appears, he deliberately stirred 
them up to make new attacks upon him. Determined, at 
any rate, to overwhelm all his enemies at once in a great 
satire, he bent all his energies, with the utmost seriousness, 
to writing 'The Dunciad' on the model of Dryden's 'Mac 
Flecknoe' and irresponsibly 'dealt damnation 'round the 
land.' Clever and powerful, the poem is still more dis- 
gusting — grossly obscene, pitifully rancorous against 
scores of insignificant creatures, and no less violent against 
some of the ablest men of the time, at whom Pope hap- 
pened to have taken offense. Yet throughout the rest of 
his life Pope continued with keen delight to work the un- 
savory production over and to bring out new editions. 

During his last fifteen years Pope's original work was 
done chiefly in two very closely related fields, first in a 
group of what he called ' Moral ' essays, second in the imi- 
tation of a few of the Satires and Epistles of Horace, 
which Pope applied to circumstances of his own time. In 
the 'Moral' Essays he had intended to deal comprehen- 
sively with human nature and institutions, but such a 
systematic plan was beyond his powers. The longest of 
the essays which he accomplished, the 'Essay on Man,' 
aims, like 'Paradise Lost,' to 'vindicate the ways of God 
to man,' but as regards logic chiefly demonstrates the 
author's inability to reason. He derived the ideas, in 
fragmentary fashion, from Bolingbroke, who was an ama- 
teur Deist and optimist of the shallow eighteenth century 
type, and so far was Pope from understanding what he 
was doing that he was greatly disturbed when it was 
pointed out to him that the theology of the poem was 
Deistic rather than Christian.* In this poem, as in all 

* The name Deist was applied rather generally in the eighteenth 
century to all persons who did not belong to some recognized 
Christian denomination. More strictly, it belongs to those men 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 213 

Pope's others of this period, the best things are the de- 
tached observations. Some of the other poems, especially 
the autobiographical 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,' are not- 
able for their masterly and venomous satirical sketches of 
various contemporary characters. 

Pope's physical disabilities brought him to premature 
old age, and he died in 1744. His declining years were 
saddened by the loss of friends, and he had never married, 
though his dependent and sensitive nature would have 
made marriage especially helpful to him. During the 
greater part of his life, however, he was faithfully watched 
over by a certain Martha Blount, whose kindness he re- 
paid with only less selfishness than that which 'Stella' 
endured from Swift. Indeed, Pope's whole attitude to- 
ward woman, which appears clearly in his poetry, was 
largely that of the Restoration. Yet after all that must 
be said against Pope, it is only fair to conclude, as does 
his biographer, Sir Leslie Stephen: 'It was a gallant 
spirit which got so much work out of this crazy carcase, 
and kept it going, spite of all its feebleness, for fifty-six 
years. ' 

The question of Pope's rank among authors is of central 
importance for any theory of poetry. In his own age 
he was definitely regarded by his adherents as the great- 
est of all English poets of all time. As the pseudo-classic 
spirit yielded to the romantic this judgment was modi- 
fied, until in the nineteenth century it was rather popular 
to deny that in any true sense Pope was a poet at all. Of 
course the truth lies somewhere between these extremes. 
Into the highest region of poetry, that of great emotion and 
imagination', Pope scarcely enters at all; he is not a poet 
in the same sense as Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Shel- 
ley, or Browning; neither his age nor his own nature 

who attempted rationalistic criticism of the Bible and wished 
to go back to what they supposed to be a primitive pure religion, 
anterior to revealed religion and free from the corruptions and 
formalism of actual Christianity. The Deistic ideas followed those 
expressed in the seventeenth century by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 
brother of George Herbert, who held that the worship due to the 
Deity consists chiefly in reverence and virtuous conduct, and also 
that man should repent of sin and forsake it and that reward and 
punishment, both in this life and hereafter, follow from the good- 
ness and justice of God. 



214 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

permitted it. In lyric, original narrative, and dramatic 
poetry he accomplished very little, though the success of 
his 'Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady' and 'Eloisa to 
Abelard' must be carefully weighed in this connection. 
On the other. hand, it may well be doubted if he can ever 
be excelled as a master in satire and kindred semi-prosaic 
forms. He is supreme in epigrams, the terse statement 
of pithy truths; his poems have furnished more brief fa- 
miliar quotations to our language than those of any other 
writer except Shakspere. For this sort of effect his rimed 
couplet provided him an unrivalled instrument, and he 
especially developed its power in antithesis, very frequently 
balancing one line of the couplet, or one half of a line, 
against the other. He had received the couplet from 
Dryden, but he polished it to a greater finish, emphasiz- 
ing, on the whole, its character as a single unit by making 
it more consistently end-stopped. By this means he gained 
in snap and point, though for purposes of continuous nar- 
rative or exposition he increased the monotony and some- 
what decreased the strength. Every reader must decide 
for himself how far the rimed couplet, in either Dryden 's 
or Pope's use of it, is a proper medium for real poetry. 
But it is certain that within the limits which he laid 
down for himself, there never was a more finished artist 
than Pope. He chooses every word with the greatest care 
for its value as both sound and sense; his minor tech- 
nique is well-night perfect, except sometimes in the matter 
of rimes; and in particular the variety which he secures, 
partly by skilful shifting of pauses and use of extra sylla- 
bles, is remarkable ; though it is a variety less forceful than 
Dryden 's. 

The judgments of certain prominent critics on the poetry of 
Pope and of his period may well be considered. Professor Lewis 
E. Gates has said: 'The special task of the pseudo-classical 
period was to order, to systematize, and to name; its favorite 
methods were analysis and generalization. It asked for no new 
experience. The abstract, the typical, the general — these were 
everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the specific ex- 
perience, the vital fact.' Lowell declares that it 'ignored the 
imagination altogether and sent Nature about her business as an 
impertinent baggage whose household loom competed unlawfully 
with the machine-made fabrics, so exquisitely uniform in pat- 
tern, of the royal manufactories. ' Still more hostile is Matthew 



i 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 215 

Arnold: 'The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry 
of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: Their 
poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is 
conceived and composed in the soul. The difference is immense. ' 
Taine is contemptuous: 'Pope did not write because he thought, 
but thought in order to write. Inky paper, and the noise it makes 
in the world, was his idol.' Professor Henry A. Beers is more 
judicious: 'Pope did in some inadequate sense hold the mirror up 
to Nature. ... It was a mirror in a drawing-room, but it gave 
back a faithful image of society, powdered and rouged, to be sure, 
and intent on trifles, yet still as human in its own way as the 
heroes of Homer in theirs, though not broadly human. ' 

It should be helpful also to indicate briefly some of the more 
specific mannerisms of pseudo-classical poetry, in addition to the 
general tendencies named above on page 190. Almost all of 
them, it will be observed, result from the habit of generalizing 
instead of searching for the pictorial and the particular. 1. There 
is a constant preference (to enlarge on what was briefly stated 
above) for abstract expressions instead of concrete ones, such ex- 
pressions as ' immortal powers ' or ' Heaven ' for ' God. ' These ab- 
stract expressions are especially noticeable in the descriptions of 
emotion, which the pseudo-classical writers often describe without 
really feeling it, in such colorless words as 'joys,' 'delights,' and 
'ecstasies,' and which they uniformly refer to the conventionalized 
'heart,' 'soul,' or 'bosom.' Likewise in the case of personal fea- 
tures, instead of picturing a face with blue eyes, rosy lips, and 
pretty color, these poets vaguely mention 'charms,' 'beauties,' 
'glories,' 'enchantments,' and the like. These three lines from 
'The Eape of the Lock' are thoroughly characteristic: 

The fair [the lady] each moment rises in her charms, 
Bepairs her smiles, awakens ev'ry grace, 
And calls forth all the wonders of her face. 
The tendency reaches its extreme in the frequent use of abstract 
and often absurdly pretentious expressions in place of the ordinary 
ones which to these poets appeared too simple or vulgar. With 
them a field is generally a 'verdant mead'; a lock of hair becomes 
'The long-contended honours of her head'; and a boot 'The shining 
leather that encased the limb.' 

2. There is a constant use of generic or generalizing articles, 
pronouns, and adjectives, 'the,' 'a,' 'that,' 'every,' and 'each,' as 
in some of the preceding and in the following examples: 'The wise 
man's passion and the vain man's boast.' 'Wind the shrill horn or 
spread the waving net.' 'To act a Lover's or a Eoman's part.' 
'That bleeding bosom.' 3. There is an excessive use of adjectives, 
often one to nearly every important noun, which creates monotony. 
4. The vocabulary is largely conventionalized, with certain favor- 
ite words usurping the place of a full and free variety, such words 
as 'conscious,' 'generous,' 'soft,' and 'amorous.' The metaphors 
employed are largely conventionalized ones, like 'Now burns with 
glory, and then melts with love.' 5. The poets imitate the Latin 
language to some extent; especially they often prefer long words 
of Latin origin to short Saxon ones, and Latin names to English 



216 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

—'Sol' for 'Sun,' 'temple' for ' church/ < Senate' for 'Parlia- 
ment,' and so on. 

Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784. To the informal position 
of dictator of English letters which had been held suc- 
cessively by Dryden, Addison, and Pope, succeeded in the 
third quarter of the eighteenth century a man very dif- 
ferent from any of them, one of the most forcefully indi- 
vidual of all authors, Samuel Johnson. It was his fortune 
to uphold, largely by the strength of his personality, the 
pseudo-classical ideals which Dryden and Addison had 
helped to form and whose complete dominance had con- 
tributed to Pope's success, in the period when their au- 
thority was being undermined by the progress of the rising 
Romantic Movement. 

Johnson was born in 1709, the son of a bookseller in 
Lichfield. He inherited a constitution of iron, great phys- 
ical strength, and fearless self-assertiveness, but also 
hypochondria (persistent melancholy), uncouthness of body 
and movement, and scrofula, which disfigured his face and 
greatly injured his eyesight. In his early life as well as 
later, spasmodic fits of abnormal mental activity when he 
'gorged' books, especially the classics, as he did food, 
alternated with other fits of indolence. The total result, 
however, was a very thorough knowledge of an extremely 
wide range of literature; when he entered Oxford in 1728 
the Master of his college assured him that he was the 
best qualified applicant whom he had ever known. John- 
son, on his side, was not nearly so well pleased with the 
University; he found the teachers incompetent, and his 
pride suffered intensely from his poverty, so that he re- 
mained at Oxford little more than a year. The death of 
his father in 1731 plunged him into a distressingly pain- 
ful struggle for existence which lasted for thirty years. 
After failing as a subordinate teacher in a boarding-school 
he became a hack-writer in Birmingham, where, at the 
age of twenty-five, he made a marriage with a widow, Mrs. 
Porter, an unattractive, rather absurd, but good-hearted 
woman of forty-six. He set up a school of his own, where 
he had only three pupils, and then in 1737 tramped with 
one of them, David Garrick, later the famous actor, to 
London to try his fortune in another field. When the 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 217 

two reached the city their combined funds amounted to 
sixpence. Sir Robert Walpole, ruling the country with 
unscrupulous absolutism, had now put an end to the em- 
ployment of literary men in public life, and though John- 
son's poem 'London/ a satire on the city written in imita- 
tion of the Roman poet Juvenal and published in 1738, 
attracted much attention, he could do no better for a time 
than to become one of that undistinguished herd of hand- 
to-mouth and nearly starving Grub Street writers whom 
Pope was so contemptuously abusing and who chiefly 
depended on the despotic patronage of magazine pub- 
lishers. Living in a garret or even walking the streets at 
night for lack of a lodging, Johnson was sometimes unable 
to appear at a tavern because he had no respectable clothes. 
It was ten years after the appearance of 'London' that 
he began to emerge, through the publication of his 'Vanity 
of Human Wishes,' a poem of the same kind as 'London' 
but more sincere and very powerful. A little later Garrick, 
who had risen very much more rapidly and was now 
manager of Drury Lane theater, gave him substantial help 
by producing his early play 'Irene,' a representative 
pseudo-classical tragedy of which it has been said that 
a person with a highly developed sense of duty may be 
able to read it through. 

Meanwhile, by an arrangement with leading booksellers, 
Johnson had entered on the largest, and, as it proved, the 
decisive, work of his life, the preparation of his ' Dictionary 
of the English Language. ' The earliest mentionable Eng- 
lish dictionary had appeared as far back as 1604, 'con- 
taining 3000 hard words . . . gathered for the benefit and 
help of ladies, gentle women, or any other unskilful per- 
sons. ' Others had followed ; but none of them was compre- 
hensive or satisfactory. Johnson, planning a far more 
thorough work, contracted to do it for £1575 — scanty pay 
for himself and his copyists, the more so that the task 
occupied more than twice as much time as he had ex- 
pected, over seven years. The result, then, of very great 
labor, the 'Dictionary' appeared in 1755. It had distinct 
limitations. The knowledge of Johnson 's day was not ade- 
quate for tracing the history and etymology of words, and 
Johnson himself on being asked the reason for one of his 
numerous blunders could only reply, with his characteris- 



218 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tic blunt frankness, 'sheer ignorance.' Moreover, he al- 
lowed his strong prejudices to intrude, even though he 
colored them with humor; for example in denning 'oats' 
as 'a grain which in England is generally given to horses, 
but in Scotland supports the people.' Jesting at himself 
he defined 'lexicographer' as 'a writer of dictionaries, a 
harmless drudge. ' Nevertheless the work, though not crea- 
tive literature, was a great and necessary one, and Johnson 
did it, on the whole, decidedly well. The 'Dictionary,' 
in successive enlargements, ultimately, though not until 
after Johnson's death, became the standard, and it gave 
him at once the definite headship of English literary life. 
Of course, it should be added, the English language has 
vastly expanded since his time, and Johnson's first edition 
contained only a tithe of the 400,000 words recorded in 
the latest edition of Webster (1910). 

With the 'Dictionary' is connected one of the best- 
known incidents in English literary history. At the out- 
set of the undertaking Johnson exerted himself to secure 
the patronage and financial aid of Lord Chesterfield, an 
elegant leader of fashion and of fashionable literature. At 
the time Chesterfield, not foreseeing the importance of the 
work, was coldly indifferent, but shortly before the Dic- 
tionary appeared, being better informed, he attempted to 
gain a share in the credit by commending it in a periodical. 
Johnson responded with a letter which is a perfect master- 
piece of bitter but polished irony and which should be 
familiar to every student. 

The hard labor of the 'Dictionary' had been the only 
remedy for Johnson's profound grief at the death of his 
wife, in 1752 ; and how intensively he could apply himself 
at need he showed again some years later when to pay his 
mother's funeral expenses he wrote in the evenings of a 
single week his ' Rasselas, ' which in the guise of an Eastern 
tale is a series of philosophical discussions of life. 

Great as were Johnson's labors during the eight years 
of preparation of the 'Dictionary' they made only a part 
of his activity. For about two years he earned a living 
income by carrying on the semi-weekly ' Rambler, ' one of the 
numerous imitations of 'The Spectator.' He was not so 
well qualified as Addison or Steele for this work, but he 
repeated it some years later in 'The Idler.' 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 219 

It was not until 1775 that Johnson received from Oxford 
the degree of LL.D. which gave him the title of 'Dr.,' 
now almost inseparable from his name ; but his long battle 
with poverty had ended on the accession of George III in 
1762, when the ministers, deciding to signalize the new 
reign by encouraging men of letters, granted Johnson a 
pension of £300 for life. In his Dictionary Johnson had 
contemptuously denned a pension thus: 'An allowance 
made to any one without an equivalent. In England, it is 
generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling 
for treason to his country.' This was embarrassing, but 
Johnson's friends rightly persuaded him to accept the 
pension, which he, at least, had certainly earned by services 
to society very far from treasonable. However, with the 
removal of financial pressure his natural indolence, in- 
creased by the strain of hardships and long-continued over- 
exertion, asserted itself in spite of his self-reproaches and 
frequent vows of amendment. Henceforth he wrote com- 
paratively little but gave expression to his ideas in con- 
versation, where his genius always showed most brilliantly. 
At the tavern meetings of 'The Club' (commonly referred 
to as 'The Literary Club'), of which Burke, Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, Goldsmith, Gibbon, and others, were members, 
he reigned unquestioned conversational monarch. Here 
or in other taverns with fewer friends he spent most of 
his nights, talking and drinking incredible quantities of 
tea, and going home in the small hours to lie abed until 
noon. 

But occasionally even yet he aroused himself to effort. 
In 1765 appeared his long-promised edition of Shakspere. 
It displays in places much of the sound sense which is one 
of Johnson's most distinguishing merits, as in the terse ex- 
posure of the fallacies of the pseudo-classic theory of the 
three dramatic unities, and it made some interpretative 
contributions; but as a whole it was carelessly and 
slightly done. Johnson's last important production, his 
most important really literary work, was a series of 'Lives 
of the English Poets' from the middle of the seventeenth 
century, which he wrote for a publishers ' collection of their 
works. The selection of poets was badly made by the 
publishers, so that many of the lives deal with very minor 
versifiers. Further, Johnson's indolence and prejudices 



220 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

are here again evident; often when he did not know the 
facts he did not take the trouble to investigate ; a thorough 
Tory himself he was often unfair to men of Whig prin- 
ciples; and for poetry of the delicately imaginative and 
romantic sort his rather painfully practical mind had 
little appreciation. Nevertheless he was in many respects 
well fitted for the work, and some of the lives, such as 
those of Dryden, Pope, Addison and Swift, men in whom 
he took a real interest, are of high merit. 

Johnson's last years were rendered gloomy, partly by 
the loss of friends, partly by ill-health and a deepening of 
his lifelong tendency to morbid depression. He had an 
almost insane shrinking from death and with it a pathetic 
apprehension of future punishment. His melancholy was 
perhaps the greater because of the manly courage and 
contempt for sentimentality which prevented him from 
complaining or discussing his distresses. His religious 
faith, also, in spite of all intellectual doubts, was strong, 
and he died calmly, in 17 8-1. He was buried in Westmin- 
ster Abbey. 

Johnson's picturesque surface oddities have received un- 
due attention, thanks largely to his friend and biographer 
Boswell. Nearly every one knows, for example, that he 
superstitiously made a practice of entering doorways in 
a certain manner and would rather turn back and come 
in again than fail in the observance ; that he was careless, 
even slovenly, in dress and person, and once remarked 
frankly that he had no passion for clean linen; that he 
ate voraciously, with a half-animal eagerness; that in the 
intervals of talking he 'would make odd sounds, a half 
whistle, or a clucking like a hen's, and when he ended 
an argument would blow out his breath like a whale. ' More 
important were his dogmatism of opinion, his intense pre- 
judices, and the often seemingly brutal dictatorial vio- 
lence with which he enforced them. Yet these things too 
were really on the surface. It is true that his nature was 
extremely conservative ; that after a brief period of youth- 
ful free thinking he was fanatically loyal to the national 
Church and to the king (though theoretically he was a 
Jacobite, a supporter of the supplanted Stuarts as against 
the reigning House of Hanover) ; and that in conversation 
he was likely to roar down or scowl down all innovators 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 221 

and their defenders or silence them with such observations 
as, 'Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig.' At worst it 
was not quite certain that he would not knock them down 
physically. Of women's preaching he curtly observed that 
it was like a dog walking on its hind legs : ' It is not done 
well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.' Eng- 
lish insular narrowness certainly never had franker ex- 
pression than in his exclamation: 'For anything I can 
see, all foreigners are fools.' For the American colonists 
who had presumed to rebel against their king his bitter- 
ness was sometimes almost frenzied ; he characterized them 
as 'rascals, robbers and pirates.' His special antipathy to 
Scotland and its people led him to insult them repeatedly, 
though with some individual Scots he was on very friendly 
terms. Yet after all, many of these prejudices rested on 
important principles which were among the most solid 
foundations of Johnson's nature and largely explain his 
real greatness, namely on sound commonsense, moral and 
intellectual independence, and hatred of insincerity. There 
was really something to be said for his refusal to listen 
to the Americans ' demand for liberty while they themselves 
held slaves. Living in a period of change, Johnson per- 
ceived that in many cases innovations prove dangerous 
and that the progress of society largely depends on the 
continuance of the established institutions in which the 
wisdom of the past is summed up. Of course in specific 
instances, perhaps in the majority of them, Johnson was 
wrong; but that does not alter the fact that he thought 
of himself as standing, and really did stand, for order 
against a freedom which is always more or less in danger 
of leading to anarchy. 

Johnson's personality, too, cannot be fairly judged by 
its more grotesque expression. Beneath the rough surface 
he was a man not only of very vigorous intellect and 
great learning, but of sincere piety, a very warm heart, 
unusual sympathy and kindness, and the most unselfish, 
though eccentric, generosity. Fine ladies were often 
fascinated by him, and he was no stranger to good society. 
On himself, during his later years, he spent only a third 
part of his pension, giving away the rest to a small army 
of beneficiaries. Some of these persons, through no claim 
on him but their need, he had rescued from abject distress 



222 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and supported in his own house, where, so far from being 
grateful, they quarreled among themselves, complained of 
the dinner, or even brought their children to live with 
them. Johnson himself was sometimes exasperated by their 

peevishness and even driven to take refuge from his own 
home in that of his wealthy friends the Thrales, where, 
indeed, he had a room of his own; but he never allowed 
any one else to criticize or speak harshly of them. In sum, 
no man was ever loved or respected more deeply, or with 
better reason, by those who really knew him, or more sin- 
cerely mourned when he died. 

Johnson's importance as a conservative was greatest in 
his professional capacity of literary -critic and bulwark 
of pseudo-classicism. In this case, except that a restrain- 
ing influence is always salutary to hold a new movement 
from extremes, he was in opposition to the time-spirit; 
romanticism was destined to a complete triumph because 
it was the expression of vital forces which were necessary 
for the rejuvenation of literature. Yet it is true that 
romanticism carried with it much vague and insincere 
sentimentality, and it was partly against this that Johnson 
protested. Perhaps the twentieth-century mind is most 
dissatisfied with his lack of sympathy for the romantic re- 
turn to an intimate appreciation of external Nature. John- 
son was not blind to the charm of Nature and sometimes 
expresses it in his own writing; but for the m ost par t his 
interest, like that of his pseudo-classical predecessors, was 
centered in the world of man. To him, as he flatly de- 
clared, Fleet Street, in the midst of the hurry of London 
life; was the most interesting place in the world. 

In the substance of his work Johnson is most conspicu- 
ously, and of set purpose, a moralist. In all his writing, 
so far as the subject permitted, he aimed chiefly at the 
inculcation of virtue and the formation of character. His 
uncompromising resoluteness in this respect accounts for 
much of the dulness which it is useless to try to deny in his 
work. 'The Rambler' and 'The Idler' altogether lack 
Addison's lightness of touch and of humor; for Johnson, 
thoroughly Puritan at heart, and dealing generally with 
the issues of personal conduct and responsibility, can 
never greatly relax his seriousness, while Addison, a man 
of the world, is content if he can produce some effect on 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUEY 223 

society as a whole. Again, a present-day reader can only 
smile when he finds Johnson in his Preface to Shakspere 
blaming the great dramatist for omitting opportunities of 
instructing and delighting, as if the best moral teachers 
were always explicit. But Johnson's moral and religious 
earnestness is essentially admirable, the more so because 
hSTcTeliberate view of the world was thoroughly pessimistic. 
His own long and unhappy experience had convinced him 
that life is for the most part a painful tribulation, to be 
endured with as much patience and courage as possible, 
under the consciousness of the duty of doing our best where 
God has put us and in the hope (though with Johnson 
not a confident hope) that we shall find our reward in 
another world. 

It has long been a popular tradition, based largely on a 
superficial page of Macaulay, that Johnson's style always 
represents the extreme of ponderous pedantry. As usual, 
the tradition must be largely discounted. It is evident 
that Johnson talked, on the whole, better than he wrote, 
that the present stimulus of other active minds aroused him 
to a complete exertion of his powers, but that in writing, 
his indolence often allowed him to compose half sleepily, 
at a low pressure. In some of his works, especially 'The 
Rambler,' where, it has been jocosely suggested, he was 
exercising the polysyllables that he wished to put into his 
' Dictionary, ' he does employ a stilted Latinized vocabulary 
and a stilted style, with too much use of abstract phrases 
for concrete ones, too many long sentences, much inverted 
order, and over-elaborate balance. His style is always 
in some respects monotonous, with little use, for instance, 
as critics have pointed out, of any form of sentence but 
the direct declarative, and with few really imaginative 
figures of speech. In much of his writing, on the other 
hand, the most conspicuous things are power and strong 
effective exposition. He often uses short sentences, whether 
or not in contrast to his long ones, with full consciousness 
of their value; when he will take the trouble, no one can 
express ideas with clearer and more forceful brevity; and 
in a very large part of his work his style carries the finely 
tonic qualities of his clear and vigorous mind. 

James Boswell and His 'Life of Johnson.' It is an in- 
teresting paradox that while Johnson's reputation as the 



224 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

chief English man of letters of his age seems secure for 
all time, his works, for the most part, do not belong to the 
field of pure literature, and, further, have long ceased, 
almost altogether, to be read. His reputation is really due 
to the interest of his personality, and that is known chiefly 
by the most famous of all biographies, the life of him by 
James Boswell. 

Boswell was a Scotch gentleman, born in 1740, the son 
of a judge who was also laird of the estate of Auchinleck 
in Ayrshire, near the English border. James Boswell 
studied law, but was never very serious in any regular 
activity. Early in life he became possessed by an extreme 
boyish-romantic admiration for Johnson's works and 
through them for their author, and at last in 1763 (only 
twenty years before Johnson's death) secured an intro- 
duction to him. Boswell took pains that acquaintance 
should soon ripen into intimacy, though it was not until 
nine years later that he could be much in Johnson's com- 
pany. Indeed it appears from Boswell's account that they 
were personally together, all told, only during a total of 
one hundred and eighty days at intermittent intervals, plus 
a hundred more continuously when in 1773 they went on 
a tour to the Hebrides. Boswell, however, made a point 
of recording in minute detail, sometimes on the spot, all 
of Johnson's significant conversation to which he listened, 
and of collecting with the greatest care his letters and all 
possible information about him. He isthp foymrjpr and 
still the most thorough representative of the modern method 
of accurate biographical writing. After Johnson's death 
he continued his researches, refusing to be hurried or dis- 
turbed by several hasty lives of his subject brought out 
by other persons, with the result that when his work ap- 
peared in 1791 it at once assumed the position among biog- 
raphies which it has ever since occupied. Boswell lived 
only four years longer, sinking more and more under the 
habit of drunkenness which had marred the greater part 
of his life. 

Boswell's character, though absolutely different from 
Johnson's, was perhaps as unusual a mixture. He was 
shallow, extremely vain, often childishly foolish, and 
disagreeably jealous of Johnson's other friends. Only 
extreme lack of personal dignity can account for the ser- 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 225 

vility of his attitude toward Johnson and his acceptance 
of the countless rebuffs from his idol some of which he 
himself records and which would have driven any other 
man away in indignation. None the less he was good- 
hearted, and the other members of Johnson 's circle, though 
they were often vexed by him and admitted him to 'The 
Club' only under virtual compulsion by Johnson, seem 
on the whole, in the upshot, to have liked him. Certainly 
it is only by force of real genius of some sort, never 
by a mere lucky chance, that a man achieves the acknowl- 
edged masterpiece in any line of work. 

Boswell's genius, one is tempted to say, consists partly of 
his absorption in the worship of his hero; more largely, 
no doubt, in his inexhaustible devotion and patience. If 
the bulk of his book becomes tiresome to some readers, it 
nevertheless gives a picture of unrivalled fulness and life- 
likeness. Boswell aimed to be absolutely complete and 
truthful. When the excellent Hannah More entreated him 
to touch lightly on the less agreeable traits of his subject 
he replied flatly that he would not cut off Johnson's claws, 
nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody. The only very 
important qualification to be made is that Boswell was not 
altogether capable of appreciating the deeper side of John- 
son's nature. It scarcely needs to be added that Boswell 
is a real literary artist. He knows how to emphasize, to 
secure variety, to bring out dramatic contrasts, and also 
to heighten without essentially falsifying, as artists must, 
giving point and color to what otherwise would seem thin 
and pale. 

Edward Gibbon and 'The Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire.' The latter part of the eighteenth cen- 
tury produced not only the greatest of all biographies but 
also the history which can perhaps best claim the same 
rank, Edward Gibbon's 'Decline and Pall of the Roman 
Empire.' History of the modern sort, aiming at minute 
scientific accuracy through wide collection of materials 
and painstaking research, and at vivid reproduction of 
the life, situations and characters of the past, had scarcely 
existed anywhere, before Gibbon, since classical times. The 
medieval chroniclers were mostly mere annalists, brief 
mechanical recorders of external events, and the few more 
philosophic historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth 



226 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

centuries do not attain the first rank. The way was partly 
prepared for Gibbon by two Scottish historians, his early 
contemporaries, the philosopher David Hume and the 
clergyman William Robertson, but they have little of his 
scientific conscientiousness. 

Gibbon, the son of a country gentleman in Surrey, was 
born in 1737. Prom Westminster School he passed at the 
age of fifteen to Oxford. Ill-health and the wretched state 
of instruction at the university made his residence there, 
according to his own exaggerated account, largely unprofit- 
able, but he remained for little more than a year; for, con- 
tinuing the reading of theological works, in which he had be- 
come interested as a child, he was converted to Catholicism, 
and was hurried by his father to the care of a Protestant 
pastor in Lausanne, Switzerland. The pastor reconverted 
him in a year, but both conversions were merely intel- 
lectual, since Gibbon was of all men the most incapable of 
spiritual emotion. Later in lite lie became a philosophic^ 
sceptic. In Lausanne he fell in love with the girl who 
later actually married M. Neeker, minister of finance un- 
der Louis XVI, and became the mother of the famous Mme. 
de Stael; but to Gibbon's father a foreign marriage was 
as impossible as a foreign religion, and the son, again, 
obediently yielded. He never again entertained the thought 
of marriage. In his five years of study at Lausanne he 
worked diligently and laid the broad foundation of the 
knowledge of Latin and Greek which was to be indispens- 
able for his great work. His mature life, spent mostly on 
his ancestral estate in England and at a villa which he 
acquired in Lausanne, was as externally uneventful as 
that of most men of letters. He was for several years a 
captain in the English militia and later a member of Parlia- 
ment and one of the Lords of Trade; all which positions 
were of course practically useful to him as a historian. 
He wrote a brief and interesting autobiography, which 
helps to reveal him as sincere and good-hearted, though cold 
and somewhat self-conceited, a rather formal man not of a 
large nature. He died in 1794. 

The circumstances under which the idea of his history 
first entered his mind were highly dramatic, though his 
own account of the incident is brief and colorless. He was 
sitting at vespers on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 227 

center of ancient Roman greatness, and the barefooted 
Catholic friars were singing the service of the honr in 
the shabby church which has long since supplanted the 
Roman Capitol. Suddenly his mind was impressed with 
the vast significance of the transformation, thus suggested, 
of the ancient world into the modern one, a process which 
has rightly been called the greatest of all historical themes. 
He straightway resolved to become its historian, but it 
was not until five years later that he really began the 
work. Then three years of steady application produced 
his first volume, in 1773, and fourteen years more the re- 
maining five. 

The first source of the greatness of Gibbon's work is his 
conscientious industry and scholarship. With unwearied 
patience he made himself thoroughly familiar with the 
great mass of materials, consisting largely of histories and 
works of general literature in many languages, belonging 
to the fourteen hundred years with which he dealt. But 
he had also the constructive power which selects, arranges, 
and proportions, the faculty of clear and systematic ex- 
position, and the interpretative historical vision which per- 
ceives and makes clear the broad tendencies in the apparent 
chaos of mere events. Much new information has neces- 
sarily been discovered since Gibbon wrote, but he laid 
his foundation so deep and broad that though his work 
may be supplemented it can probably never be superseded, 
and stands in the opinion of competent critics without an 
equal in the whole field of history except perhaps for that 
of the Greek Thucydides. His one great deficiency is his 
lack of emotion. By intellectual processes he realizes and 
partly visualizes the past, with its dramatic scenes and 
moments, but he cannot throw himself into it (even if the 
material afforded by his authorities had permitted) with 
the passionate vivifying sympathy of later, romantic, his- 
torians. There are interest and power in his narratives of 
Julian's expedition into Assyria, of Zenobia's brilliant 
career, and of the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, 
but not the stirring power of Green or Froude or Macaulay. 
The most unfortunate result of this deficiency, however, is 
his lack of appreciation of the immense meaning of spir- 
itual forces, most notoriously evident in the cold analysis, 
in his fifteenth chapter, of the reasons for the success of 



228 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Christianity. 

His style possesses much of the same virtues and limi- 
tations as his substance. He has left it on record that he 
composed each paragraph mentally as a whole before com- 
mitting any part of it to paper, balancing and reshaping 
until it fully satisfied his sense of unity and rhythm. 
Something of formality and ponderousness quickly becomes 
evident in his style, together with a rather mannered use 
of potential instead of direct indicative verb forms; how 
his style compares with Johnson's and how far it should 
be called pseudo-classical, are interesting questions to con- 
sider. One appreciative description of it may be quoted: 
'The language of Gibbon never flags; he walks forever as 
to the clash of arms, under an imperial banner ; a military 
music animates his magnificent descriptions of battles, of 
sieges, of panoramic scenes of antique civilization.' 

A longer eulogistic passage will sum up his achievement 
as a whole : * 

'The historian of literature will scarcely reach the name 
of Edward Gibbon without emotion. It is not merely that 
with this name is associated one of the most splendid works 
which Europe produced in the eighteenth century, but that 
the character of the author, with all its limitations and 
even with all its faults, presents us with a typical specimen 
of the courage and singleheartedness of a great man of 
letters. Wholly devoted to scholarship without pedantry, 
and to his art without any of the petty vanity of the liter- 
ary artist, the life of Gibbon was one long sacrifice to the 
purest literary enthusiasm. He lived to know, and to re- 
build his knowledge in a shape as durable and as mag- 
nificent as a Greek temple. He Avas content for years and 
years to lie unseen, unheard of, while younger men rose 
past him into rapid reputation. No unworthy impatience 
to be famous, no sense of the uncertainty of life, no weari- 
ness or terror at the length or breadth of his self-imposed 
task, could induce him at any moment of weakness to give 
way to haste or discouragement in the persistent regular 
collection and digestion of his material or in the harmoni- 
ous execution of every part of his design. ... No man who 
honors the profession of letters, or regards with respect 

* Edmund Gosse, ' History of Eighteenth Century Literature, ' 
p. 350. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 229 

the higher and more enlightened forms of scholarship, will 
ever think without admiration of the noble genins of Gib- 
bon.' • It may be added that Gibbon is one of the con- 
spicuous examples of a man whose success was made pos- 
sible only by the possession and proper use of inherited 
wealth, with the leisure which it brings. 

Edmund Burke. The last great prose-writer of the 
eighteenth century, Edmund Burke, is also the greatest 
of English orators. Burke is the only writer primarily a 
statesman and orator who can be properly ranked among 
English authors of the first class. The reasons, operating 
in substantially the same way in all literature, are not 
hard to understand. The interests with which statesmen 
and orators deal are usually temporary; the spirit and 
style which give a spoken address the strongest appeal 
to an audience often have in them something of super- 
ficiality ; and it is hard for the orator even to maintain his 
own mind on the higher level of rational thought and dis- 
interested purpose. Occasionally, however, a man appears 
in public life who to the power of compelling speech and 
the personality on which it is based adds intellect, a philo- 
sophic temperament, and the real literary, poetic, quality. 
Such men were Demosthenes, Cicero, Webster, and at 
times Lincoln, and beside them in England stands Burke. 
It is certainly an interesting coincidence that the chief 
English representatives of four outlying regions of litera- 
ture should have been closely contemporaneous — Johnson 
the moralist and hack writer, Boswell the biographer, Gib- 
bon the historian, and Burke the orator. 

Burke was born in Dublin in 1729 of mixed English and 
Irish parentage. Both strains contributed very important 
elements to his nature. As English we recognize his in- 
domitable perseverance, practical good sense, and devotion 
to established principles; as largely Irish his spontaneous 
enthusiasm, ardent emotion, and disinterested idealism. 
Always brilliant, in his earlier years he was also desultory 
and somewhat lawless. From Trinity College in Dublin 
he crossed over to London and studied law, which he soon 
abandoned. In 1756 he began his career as an author 
with 'A Vindication of Natural Society,' a skilful satire 
on the philosophic writings which Bolingbroke (the friend 
of Swift and Pope) had put forth after his political fall 



230 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and which, while nominally expressing the deistic prin- 
ciples of natural religion, were virtually antagonistic to 
all religious faith. Burke's ' Philosophical Inquiry into 
the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful,' 
published the same year, and next in time after Dryden 
among important English treatises on esthetics, has lost 
all authority with the coming of the modern science of 
psychology, but it is at least sincere and interesting. Burke 
now formed his connection with Johnson and his circle. 
An unsatisfactory period as secretary to an official in Ire- 
land proved prolog to the gift of a seat in Parliament 
from a Whig lord, and thus at the age of thirty-six Burke 
at last entered on the public life which was his proper 
sphere of action. Throughout his life, however, he con- 
tinued to be involved in large debts and financial diffi- 
culties, the pressure of which on a less buoyant spirit 
would have been a very serious handicap. 

As a politician and statesman Burke is one of the finest 
figures in English history. He was always a devoted 
Whig, because he believed that the party system was 
the only available basis for representative government ; but 
he believed also, and truly, that the Whig party, controlled 
though it was by a limited and largely selfish oligarchy of 
wealthy nobles, was the only effective existing instrument 
of political and social righteousness. To this cause of pub- 
lic righteousness, especially to the championing of freedom, 
Burke 's whole career was dedicated ; he showed himself al- 
together possessed by the passion for truth and justice. 
Yet equally conspicuous was his insistence on respect for 
the practicable. Freedom and justice, he always declared, 
agreeing thus far with Johnson, must be secured not by 
hasty violence but under the forms of law, government, 
and religion which represent the best wisdom of past gen- 
erations. Of any proposal he always asked not only 
whether it embodied abstract principles of right but 
whether it was workable and expedient in the existing cir- 
cumstances and among actual men. No phrase could bet- 
ter describe Burke's spirit and activity than that which 
Matthew Arnold coined of him — 'the generous applica- 
tion of ideas to life.' It was England's special misfortune 
that, lagging far behind him in both vision and sym- 
pathy, she did not allow him to save her from the greatest 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 231 

disaster of her history. Himself she repaid with the usual 
reformer's reward. Though he soon made himself 'the 
brains of the Whig party, ' which at times nothing but his 
energy and ability held together, and though in conse- 
quence he was retained in Parliament virtually to the 
end of his life, he was never appointed to any office except 
that of Paymaster of the Forces, which he accepted after 
he had himself had the annual salary reduced from £25,000 
to £4,000, and which he held for only a year. 

During all the early part of his public career Burke 
steadily fought against the attempts of the King and his 
Tory clique to entrench themselves within the citadel of 
irresponsible government. At one time also he largely 
devoted his efforts to a partly successful attack on the 
wastefulness and corruption of the government; and his 
generous effort to secure just treatment of Ireland and 
the Catholics was pushed so far as to result in the loss 
of his seat as member of Parliament from Bristol. But the 
permanent interest of his thirty years of political life con- 
sists chiefly in his share in the three great questions, 
roughly successive in time, of what may be called Eng- 
land's foreign policy, namely the treatment of the Eng- 
lish colonies in America, the treatment of the native popu- 
lation of the English empire in India, and the attitude of 
England toward the French Revolution. In dealing with 
the first two of these questions Burke spoke with noble 
ardor for liberty and the rights of man, which he felt 
the English government to be disregarding. Equally no- 
table with his zeal for justice, however, was his intellectual 
mastery of the facts. Before he attempted to discuss either 
subject he had devoted to it many years of the most pains- 
taking study — in the case of India no less than fourteen 
years ; and his speeches, long and highly complicated, were 
filled with minute details and exact statistics, which his 
magnificent memory enabled him to deliver without notes. 

His most important discussions of American affairs are 
the 'Speech on American Taxation' (1774), the 'Speech 
on Conciliation with America' (1775), both delivered in 
Parliament while the controversy was bitter but before 
war had actually broken out, and 'A Letter to the Sheriffs 
of Bristol' (1777). Burke's plea was that although Eng- 
land had a theoretical constitutional right to tax the col- 



232 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

onies it was impracticable to do so against their will, that 
the attempt was therefore useless and must lead to disaster, 
that measures of conciliation instead of force should be 
employed, and that the attempt to override the liberties 
of Englishmen in America, those liberties on which the 
greatness of England was founded, would establish a dan- 
gerous precedent for a similar course of action in the 
mo! her country itself. In the fulfilment of his prophecies 
which followed the rejection of his argumenl Burke was too 
good a patriot to take satisfaction. 

In his efforts in behalf of India Burke again met with 
apparent defeat, hut in this ease lie virtually secured the 
results at which he had aimed. During the seventeenth 
century the English East India Company, originally or- 
ganized for trade, had acquired possessions in India, which. 
in the middle of the eighteenth century and later, the 
genius of Clive and Warren Hastings had increased and 
consolidated into a great empire. The work which these 
men had done was rough work and it could not be accom- 
plished by scrupulous methods; under their rule, as be- 
fore, there had been much irregularity and corruption, and 
part of the native population had suffered much injustice 
and misery. Burke and other men saw the corruption and 
misery without realizing the excuses for it and on the re- 
turn of Hastings to England in 1786 they secured his im- 
peachment. For nine years Burke, Sheridan, and Fox 
conducted the prosecution, vying with one another in bril- 
liant speeches, and Burke especially distinguished himself 
by the warmth of sympathetic imagination with which he 
impressed on his audiences the situation and sufferings 
of a far-distant and alien race. The House of Lords ulti- 
mately acquitted Hastings, but at the bar of public opinion 
Burke had brought about the condemnation and reform, 
for which the time was now ripe, of the system which 
Hastings had represented. 

While the trial of Hastings was still in progress all 
Europe was shaken by the outbreak of the French Revolu- 
tion, which for the remainder of his life became the main 
and perturbing subject of Burke's attention. Here, with 
an apparent change of attitude, for reasons which we will 
soon consider, Burke ranged himself on the conservative 
side, and here at last he altogether carried the judgment of 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 233 

England with him. One of the three or four greatest move- 
ments in modern history, the French Revolution exercised a 
profound influence on English thought and literature, and 
we must devote a few words to its causes and progress. 
During the two centuries while England had been steadily 
winning her way to constitutional government, France had 
past more and more completely under the control of a 
cynically tyrannical despotism and a cynically corrupt 
and cruel feudal aristocracy.* For a generation, radical 
French philosophers had been opposing to the actual mis- 
ery of the peasants the ideal of the natural right of all 
men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and at 
last in 1789 the people, headed by the lawyers and thinkers 
of the middle class, arose in furious determination, swept 
away their oppressors, and after three years established a 
republic. The outbreak of the Revolution was hailed by 
English liberals with enthusiasm as the commencement of 
an era of social justice; but as it grew in violence and 
at length declared itself the enemy of all monarchy and 
of religion, their attitude changed ; and in 1793 the execu- 
tion of the French king and queen and the atrocities of 
the Reign of Terror united all but the radicals in sup- 
port of the war against France in which England joined 
with the other European countries. During the twenty 
years of struggle that followed the portentous figure of 
Napoleon soon appeared, though only as Burke was dying, 
and to oppose and finally to suppress him became the 
duty of all Englishmen, a duty not only to their country 
but to humanity. 

At the outbreak of the Revolution Burke was already 
sixty, and the inevitable tendency of his mind was away 
from the enthusiastic liberalism which had so strongly 
moved him in behalf of the Americans and the Hindoos. At 
the very outset he viewed the Revolution with distrust, and 
this distrust soon changed to the most violent opposition. 
Of actual conditions in France he had no adequate under- 
standing. He failed to realize that the French people were 
asserting their most elementary rights against an oppres- 
sion a hundred times more intolerable than anything that 
the Americans had suffered; his imagination had long be- 

* The conditions are vividly pictured in Dickens 7 'Tale of Two 
Cities' and Carlyle's 'French Revolution.' 



234 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

fore been dazzled during a brief stay in Paris by the ex- 
ternal glitter of the French Court; his own chivalrous 
sympathy was stirred by the sufferings of the queen; and 
most of all he saw in the Revolution the overthrow of what 
he held to be the only safe foundations of society — estab- 
lished government, law, social distinctions, and religion — 
by the untried abstract theories which he had always held 
in abhorrence. Moreover, the activity of the English sup- 
porters of the French revolutionists seriously threatened 
an outbreak of anarchy in England also. Burke, there- 
fore, very soon began to oppose the whole movement with 
all his might. His ' Reflections on the Revolution in France, ' 
published in 1790, though very one-sided, is a most powerful 
model of reasoned denunciation and brilliant eloquence ; it 
had a wide influence and restored Burke to harmony with 
the great majority of his countrymen. His remaining years, 
however, were increasingly gloomy. His attitude caused 
a hopeless break with the liberal Whigs, including Fox; 
he gave up his seat in Parliament to his only son, whose 
death soon followed to prostrate him ; and the successes of 
the French plunged him into feverish anxiety. After again 
pouring out a flood of passionate eloquence in four letters 
entitled 'Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace' 
(with France) he died in 1797. 

We have already indicated many of the sources of 
Burke's power as a speaker and writer, but others remain 
to be mentioned. Not least important are his faculties of 
logical arrangement and lucid statement. He was the first 
Englishman to exemplify with supreme skill all the tech- 
nical devices of exposition and argument — a very careful 
ordering of ideas according to a plan made clear, but not 
too conspicuous, to the hearer or reader; the use of sum- 
maries, topic sentences, connectives ; and all the others. In 
style he had made himself an instinctive master of 
rhythmical balance, with something, as contrasted with, 
nineteenth century writing, of eighteenth century formal- 
ity. Yet he is much more varied, flexible, and fluent than 
Johnson or Gibbon, with much greater variety of sentence 
forms and with far more color, figurativeness and pictur- 
esqueness of phrase. In his most eloquent and sympa- 
thetic passages he is a thorough poet, splendidly imagina- 
tive and dramatic. J. R. Greene in his 'History of Eng- 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 235 

land' has well spoken of 'the characteristics of his oratory 
— its passionate ardor, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodi- 
gality of resources; the dazzling succession in which irony, 
pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant word pic- 
tures, the coolest argument, followed each other.' Funda- 
mental, lastly, in Burke's power, is his philosophic insight, 
his faculty of correlating facts and penetrating below this 
surface, of viewing events in the light of their abstract 
principles, their causes and their inevitable results. 

In spite of all this, in the majority of cases Burke was 
not a successful speaker. The overwhelming logic and 
feeling of his speech 'On the Nabob of Arcot's Debts' pro- 
duced so little effect at its delivery that the ministers 
against whom it was directed did not even think neces- 
sary to answer it. One of Burke's contemporaries has re- 
corded that he left the Parliament house (crawling under 
the benches to avoid Burke's notice) in order to escape 
hearing one of his speeches which when it was published 
he read with the most intense interest. In the latter part 
of his life Burke was even called 'the dinner-bell of the 
House' because his rising to speak was a signal for a gen- 
eral exodus of the other members. The reasons for this 
seeming paradox are apparently to be sought in some- 
thing deeper than the mere prejudice of Burke's op- 
ponents. He was prolix, but, chiefly, he was undignified 
in appearance and manner and lacked a good delivery. It 
was only when the sympathy or interest of his hearers en- 
abled them to forget these things that they were swept 
away by the force of his reason or the contagion of his wit 
or his emotion. On such occasions, as in his first speech 
in the impeachment of Hastings, he was irresistible. 

From what has now been said it must be evident that 
while Burke's temperament and mind were truly classical 
in some of their qualities, as in his devotion to order and 
established institutions, and in the clearness of his thought 
and style, and while in both spirit and style he manifests 
a regard for decorum and formality which connects him 
with the pseudo-classicists, nevertheless he shared to at 
least as great a degree in those qualities of emotion and 
enthusiasm which the pseudo-classic writers generally 
lacked and which were to distinguish the romantic writers 
of the nineteenth century. How the romantic movement 



236 A BISTORT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

had begun, long before Burke eame to maturity, and how 

it had made its way even in the midst of the pseudo- 
classical period, we may now consider. 

The Romantic Movement. The reaction which was 
bound to accompany the triumph of Pseudo-classicism, as 
a reassertion of those instincts in human nature which 
Pseudo-classicism disregarded, look the form of a dis- 
tinct Romantic Revival. Beginning just about as Pope's 
reputation was reaching its climax, and gathering mo- 
mentum throughout the greater part of the eighteenth 
century, this movement eventually gained a predominance 
as complete as thai which Pseudo-classicism had enjoyed. 
and became the chief force, not only in England bu1 in 
all Western Europe, in the Literature of the whole nine- 
teenth century. Tin- impulse was not confined to Litera- 
ture, but permeated all the life of the time. Jn the sphere 
of religion, especially, the second decade of the eighteenth 
century saw the awakening of the English church from 
Lethargy by the great revival of John and Charles Wesley, 
whence, quite contrary to their original intention, sprang 
the Methodist denomination. In political life the French 
Revolution was a result of the same set of influences. Ro^ 
manticism showed itself partly in the supremacy of the 
Sentimental Comedy and in the great share taken by 
Sentimentalism in the development of the novel, of both 
of which we shall speak hereafter; but its fullest and most 
steadily progressive manifestation was in non-dramatic 
poetry. Its main traits as they appear in the eighteenth 
century are as clearly ma iked as the contrasting ones of 
Pseudo-classicism, and we can enumerate them distinctly, 
though it must of course be understood that they appear 
in different authors in very different degrees and com- 
binations. 

1. There is, among the Romanticists, a general breaking 
away not only from the definite pseudo-classical principles, 
but from the whole idea of submission to fixed authority. 
Instead there is a spirit of independence and revolt, an 
insistence on the value of originality and the right of 
the individual to express himself ~m his own fashion. 2. 
There is a strong reassertion of the value of emotion, imagi- 
nation, and enthusiasm. This naturally involves some 
reaction against The pseudo-classic, and also the true classic, 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 237 

regard for finished form. 3. There is a renewal of genu- 
ine appreciation and love for external Nature, not least 
for her large and great aspects, such as mountains and 
the sea. The contrast between the pseudo-classical and the 
romantic attitude in this respect is clearly illustrated, as 
has often been pointed out, by the difference between the 
impressions recorded by Addison and by the poet Gray 
in the presence of the Alps. Addison, discussing what he 
saw in Switzerland, gives most of his attention to the 
people and politics. One journey he describes as 'very 
troublesome,' adding: 'You can't imagine how I am 
pleased with the sight of a plain.' In the mountains he 
is conscious chiefly of difficulty and danger, and the near- 
est approach to admiration which he indicates is 'an agree- 
able kind of horror.' Gray, on the other hand, speaks of 
the Grande Chartreuse as 'one of the most solemn, 
the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes. . . . 
I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an ex- 
clamation that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, 
not a torrent, nor a cliff, but is pregnant with religion 
and poetry.' 4. The same passionate appreciation ex- 
tends with the Romanticists to all full and rich beauty 
and everything grand and heroic. 5. This is naturally con- 
nected also with a love for the remote, the strange, and 
the unusual, for mystery, the supernatural, and every- 
thing that creates wonder. Especially, there is a great re- 
vival of interest in the Middle Ages, whose life seemed to 
the men of the eighteenth century, and indeed to a large 
extent really was, picturesque and by comparison varied 
and adventurous. In the eighteenth century this particular 
revival was called 'Gothic,' a name which the Pseudo-clas- 
sicists, using it as a synonym for 'barbarous,' had applied 
to the Middle Ages and all their works, on the mistaken 
supposition that all the barbarians who overthrew the 
Roman Empire and founded the medieval states were 
Goths. 6. In contrast to the pseudo-classical preference 
for abstractions, there is, among the Romanticists, a de- 
votion to concrete things, the details of Nature and of 
life. In expression, of course, this brings about a return 
to specific words and phraseology, in the desire to picture 
objects clearly and fully. 7. There is an increasing demo- 
eratic feeling, a breaking away from the interest in arti- 



238 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ficial social life and a conviction that every human being 
is worthy of respect. Hence sprang the sentiment of uni- 
versal brotherhood and the interest in universal freedom, 
which finally extended even to the negroes and resulted 
in the abolition of slavery. But from the beginning there 
was a reawakening of interest in the life of the common 
people — an impulse which is not inconsistent with the 
love of the remote and unusual, but rather means the dis- 
covery of a neglected world of novelty at the very door 
of the educated and literary classes. 8. There is a strong 
tendency to melancholy, which is often carried to the point 
of morbidness and often expresses itself in meditation and 
moralizing on the tragedies of life and the mystery of death. 
This inclination is common enough in many romantic- 
spirited persons of all times, and it is always a symptom 
of immaturity or lack of perfect balance. Among the 
earlier eighteenth century Romanticists there was a very 
flourishing crop of doleful verse, since known from the 
place where most of it was located, as the ' Graveyard 
poetry.' Even Gray's ' Elegy in a Country Churchyard' 
is only the finest representative of this form, just as 
Shakspere's 'Hamlet' is the culmination of the crude Eliza- 
bethan tragedy of blood. So far as the mere tendency to 
moralize is concerned, the eighteenth century Romanticists 
continue with scarcely any perceptible change the practice 
of the Pseudo-classicists. 9. In poetic form, though the 
Romanticists did not completely abandon the pentameter 
couplet for a hundred years, they did energetically renounce 
any exclusive allegiance to it and returned to many other 
meters. Milton was one of their chief masters, and his 
example led tcTthe revival of blank verse and of the octo- 
syllabic couplet. There was considerable use also of the 
Spenserian stanza, and development of a great variety of 
lyric stanza forms, though not in the prodigal profusion 
of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. 

James Thomson. The first author in whom the new im- 
pulse found really definite expression was the Scotsman 
James Thomson. At the age of twenty-five, Thomson, like 
many of his countrymen during his century and the previ- 
ous one, came fortune-hunting to London, and the next 
year, 1726, while Pope was issuing his translation of 'The 
Odyssey,' he published a blank-verse poem of several hun- 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 239 

dred lines on 'Sinter.' Its genuine though imperfect ap- 
preciation and description of Nature as she appears on the 
broad sweeps of the Scottish moors, combined with its 
novelty, gave it great success, and Thomson went on to 
write also of Summer, Spring and Autumn, publishing the 
whole work as 'The Seasons' in 1730. He was rewarded 
by the gift of sinecure offices'" from the government and 
did some further writing, including, probably, the patriotic 
lyric, 'Rule, Britannia,' and also pseudo-classical trage- 
dies ; but his only~o"ther poem of much importance is ' The 
Castle of Indolence' (a subject appropriate to his own 
good-natured, easy-going disposition), which appeared just 
before his death, in 1748. In it he employs Spenser's 
stanza, with real skill, but in a half -jesting fashion which 
the later eighteenth-century Romanticists also seem to have 
thought necessary when they adopted it, apparently as a 
sort of apology for reviving so old-fashioned a form. 

'The Seasons' was received with enthusiasm not only in 
England but in France and Germany, and it gave an im- 
pulse for the writing of descriptive poetry which lasted 
for a generation; but Thomson's romantic achievement, 
though important, is tentative and incomplete, like that 
of all beginners. He described Nature from full and sym- 
pathetic first-hand observation, but there is still a cer- 
tain stiffness about his manner, very different from the 
intimate and confident familiarity and power of spiritual 
interpretation which characterizes the great poets of three 
generations later. Indeed, the attempt to write several 
thousand lines of pure descriptive poetry was in itself ill- 
judged, since as the German critic Lessing later pointed 
out, poetry is the natural medium not for description but 
for narration ; and Thomson himself vitually admitted this 
in part by resorting to long dedications and narrative epi- 
sodes to fill out his scheme. Further, romantic as he was in 
spirit, he was not able to free himself from the pseudo- 
classical mannerisms; every page of his poem abounds 
with the old lifeless phraseology — 'the finny tribes' for 'the 
fishes,' 'the vapoury whiteness' for 'the snow' or 'the hard- 
won treasures of the year' for 'the crops.' His blank 
verse, too, is comparatively clumsy — padded with unneces- 
sary words and the lines largely end-stopped. 

William Collins. There is marked progress in romantic 



240 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

feeling and power of expression as we pass from Thomson 
to his disciple, the frail lyric poet, William Collins. Collins, 
born at Chichester, was an undergraduate at Oxford when 
he published 'Persian Eclogues' in rimed couplets to which 
the warm feeling and free metrical treatment give much of 
romantic effect. In London three years later (1746) Col- 
lins put forth his significant work in a little volume of 
'Odes.' Discouraged by lack of appreciation, always ab- 
normally high-strung and neurasthenic, he gradually 
lapsed into insanity, and died at the age of thirty-seven. 
Collins' poems show most of the romantic traits and their 
impetuous emotion often expresses itself in the form of the 
false Pindaric ode which Cowley had introduced. His 
'Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands,' fur- 
ther, was one of the earliest pieces of modern literature to 
return for inspiration to the store of medieval supernat- 
uralism, in this case to Celtic supernaturalism. But Collins 
has also an exquisiteness of feeling which makes others of 
his pieces perfect examples of the true classical style. The 
two poems in ' Horatian ' ode forms, that is in regular short 
stanzas, the 'Ode Written in the Year 1746' and the 'Ode 
to Evening' (unrimed), are particularly fine. With all 
this, Collins too was not able to escape altogether from 
pseudo-classicism. His subjects are often abstract — 'The 
Passions, ' ' Liberty, ' and the like ; his characters, too, in 
almost all his poems, are merely the old abstract personi- 
fications, Fear, Fancy, Spring, and many others; and his 
phraseology is often largely in the pseudo-classical fash- 
ion. His work illustrates, therefore, in an interesting way 
the conflict of poetic forces in his time and the influence 
of environment on a poet's mind. The true classic instinct 
and the romanticism are both his own; the pseudo-classi- 
cism belongs to the period. 

Thomas Gray. Precisely the same conflict of impulses 
appears in the lyrics of a greater though still minor poet 
of the same generation, a man of perhaps still more delicate 
sensibilities than Collins, namely Thomas Gray. Gray, the 
only survivor of many sons of a widow who provided for 
him by keeping a millinery shop, was born in 1716. At 
Eton he became intimate with Horace Walpole, the son of 
the Prime Minister, who was destined to become an amateur 
leader in the Romantic Movement, and after some years at 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 241 

Cambridge the two traveled together on the Continent. 
Lacking the money for the large expenditure required in 
the study of law, Gray took up his residence in the col- 
lege buildings at Cambridge, where he lived as a recluse, 
much annoyed by the noisy undergraduates. During his 
last three years he held the appointment and salary of pro- 
fessor of modern history, but his timidity prevented him 
from delivering any lectures. He died in 1771. He was 
primarily a scholar and perhaps the most learned man of 
his time. He was familiar with the literature and history 
not only of the ancient world but of all the important 
modern nations of western Europe, with philosophy, the 
sciences of painting, architecture, botany, zoology, garden- 
ing, entomology (he had a large collection of insects), and 
even heraldry. He was himself an excellent musician. In- 
deed almost the only subject of contemporary knowledge 
in which he was not proficient was mathematics, for which 
he had an aversion, and which prevented him from taking 
a college degree. 

The bulk of Gray's poetry is very small, no larger, in 
fact, than that of Collins. Matthew Arnold argued in a 
famous essay that his productivity was checked by the un- 
congenial pseudo-classic spirit of the age, which, says 
Arnold, w r as like a chill north wind benumbing his inspira- 
tion, so that ' he never spoke out. ' The main reason, how- 
ever, is really to be found in Gray's own over-painstaking 
and diffident disposition. In him, as in Hamlet, anxious 
and scrupulous striving for perfection went far to para- 
lyze the power of creation ; he was unwilling to write 
except at his best, or to publish until he had subjected his 
work to repeated revisions, which sometimes, as in the 
case of his 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,' 
extended over many years. He is the extreme type of the 
academic poet. His work shows, however, considerable 
variety, including real appreciation for Nature, as in the 
'Ode on the Spring,' delightful quiet humor, as in the 'Ode 
on a Favorite Cat,' rather conventional moralizing, as in 
the 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,' magnifi- 
cent expression of the fundamental human emotions, as 
in the ' Elegy, ' and warlike vigor in the ' Norse Ode ' trans- 
lated from the 'Poetic Edda' in his later years. In the 
latter he manifests his interest in Scandinavian antiquity, 



242 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

which had then become a minor object of romantic en- 
thusiasm. The student should consider for himself the 
mingling of the true classic, pseudo- classic, and romantic 
elements in the poems, not least in the 'Elegy,' and the 
precise sources of their appeal and power. In form most 
of them are regular 'Horatian' odes, but 'The Bard' and 
'The Progress of Poesy' are the best English examples of 
the genuine Pindaric ode. 

Oliver Goldsmith. Next in order among the romantic 
poets after Gray, and more thoroughly romantic than 
Gray, was Oliver Goldsmith, though, with characteristic 
lack of the power of self-criticism, he supposed himself to 
be a loyal follower of Johnson and therefore a member of 
the opposite camp. Goldsmith, as every one knows, is one 
of the most attractive and lovable figures in English lit- 
erature. Like Burke, of mixed English and Irish ances- 
try, the son of a poor country curate of the English 
Church in Ireland, he was born in 1728. Awkward, sen- 
sitive, and tender-hearted, he suffered greatly in child- 
hood from the unkindness of his fellows. As a poor 
student at the University of Dublin he was not more 
happy, and his lack of application delayed the gaining 
of his degree until two years after the regular time. The 
same Celtic desultoriness characterized all the rest of his 
life, though it could not thwart his genius. Rejected as 
a candidate for the ministry, he devoted three years to 
the nominal study of medicine at the Universities of Edin- 
burgh and Ley den (in Holland). Next he spent a year 
on a tramping trip through Europe, making his way by 
playing the flute and begging. Then, gravitating naturally 
to London, he earned his living by working successively 
for a druggist, for the novelist-printer Samuel Richard- 
son, as a teacher in a boys' school, and as a hack writer. 
At last at the age of thirty-two he achieved success with 
a series of periodical essays later entitled 'The Citizen 
of the World,' in which he criticized European politics 
and society with skill and insight. Bishop Percy now 
introduced him to Johnson, who from this time watched 
over him and saved him from the worst results of his 
irresponsibility. He was one of the original members of 
'The Club.' In 1764 occurred the well-known and charac- 
teristic incident of the sale of 'The Vicar of Wakefield.' 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 243 

Arrested for debt at his landlady's instance, Goldsmith 
sent for Johnson and showed him the manuscript of the 
book. Johnson took it to a publisher, and though with- 
out much expectation of success asked and received £60 
for it. It was published two years later. Meanwhile in 
1764 appeared Goldsmith's descriptive poem, 'The Trav- 
eler,' based on his own experiences in Europe. Six years 
later it was followed by 'The Deserted Village,' which 
was received with the great enthusiasm that it merited. 

Such high achievement in two of the main divisions of 
literature was in itself remarkable, especially as Gold- 
smith was obliged to the end of his life to spend much of 
his time in hack writing, but in the later years of his 
short life he turned also with almost as good results to 
the drama (comedy). We must stop here for the few 
words of general summary which are all that the eigh- 
teenth century drama need receive in a brief survey like 
the present one. Du ring th e , first ha lf of the century, 
as we have seen, an occasional pseudo-classical tragedy 
was written, none of them of any greater excellence than 
Addison's 'Cato' and Johnson's 'Irene' (above, pages 205 
and 217). The second quarter of the century was largely 
given over to farces and burlesques, which absorbed the 
early literary activity of the novelist Henry Fielding, until 
their attacks on Walpole's governmenf~Ted~~to a severe 
licensing act, which suppressed them. But the most dis- 
tinctive and predominant forms of the middle and latter 
half of the century were, first, the Sentimental Comedy, 
whose origin may be roughly assigned"" to Steele, and, 
second, the domestic melodrama, which grew out of it. In 
the Sentimental" Comedy the elements of mirth and ro- 
mance which are the legitimate bases of comedy were 
largely subordinated to exaggerated pathos, and in the 
domestic melodrama the experiences of insignificant per- 
sons of the middle class were presented for sympathetic 
consideration in the same falsetto fashion. Both forms 
(indeed, they were one in spirit) were extreme products 
of the romantic return to sentiment and democratic feel- 
ing. Both were enormously popular and, crossing the 
Channel, like Thomson's poetic innovation, exerted a great 
influence on the drama of Prance and Germany (espe- 
cially in the work of Lessing), and in general on the 



244 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

German Romantic Movement. Goldsmith was inferior to 
no one in genuine sentiment, but he was disgusted at the 
sentimental excesses of these plays. His 'Good Natured 
Man,' written with the express purpose of opposing them, 
and brought out in 1768, was reasonably successful, and 
in 1771 his far superior 'She Stoops to Conquer' virtually 
put an end to Sentimental Comedy. This is one of the 
very few English comedies of a former generation which 
are still occasionally revived on the stage to-day. Gold- 
smith's comedies, we may add here for completeness, were 
shortly followed by the more brilliant ones of another 
Irish-Englishman, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who dis- 
played Congreve's wit without his cynicism. These were 
'The Rivals,' produced in 1775, when Sheridan was only 
twenty-four, and 'The School for Scandal,' 1777. Sheri- 
dan, a reckless man of fashion, continued most of his life 
to be owner of Drury Lane Theater, but he soon aban- 
doned playwriting to become one of the leaders of the 
Whig party. With Burke and Fox, as we have seen, he 
conducted the impeachment of Hastings. ' 

'She Stoops to Conquer' was Goldsmith's last triumph. 
A few months later, in 1774, he died at the age of only 
forty-five, half submerged, as usual, in foolish debts, but 
passionately mourned not only by his acquaintances in 
the literary and social worlds, but by a great army of 
the poor and needy to whom he had been a benefactor. 
In the face of this testimony to his human worth his child- 
ish vanities and other weaknesses may well be pardoned. 

All Goldsmith's literary work is characterized by one 
main quality, a charming atmosphere of optimistic happi- 
ness which is the expression of the best side of his own 
nature. The scene of all his most important productions, 
very appropriately, is the country — the idealized English 
country. Very much, to be sure, in all his works has to 
be conceded to the spirit of romance. Both in 'The Vicar 
of Wakefield' and in 'She Stoops to Conquer' characteri- 
zation is mostly conventional, and events are very arbi- 
trarily manipulated for the sake of the effects in rather 
free-and-easy disregard of all principles of motivation. 
But the kindly knowledge of the main forces j q huma n 
nature, the unfailing sympathy, and the irrepressible con- 
viction that happiness depends in the last analysis on the 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 245 

individual will and character make Goldsmith's writings, 
especially 'The Vicar/ delightful and refreshing. All in 
all, however, 'The Deserted Village' is his masterpiece, 
with its romantic regret, verging on tragedy but softened 
away from it, and its charming type characterizations, as 
incisive as those of Chaucer and Dryden, but without 
any of Dryden 's biting satire. In the choice of the rimed 
couplet for 'The Traveler' and 'The Deserted Village' 
the influence of pseudo-classicism and of Johnson appears ; 
but Goldsmith's treatment of the form, with his variety 
in pauses and his simple but fervid eloquence, make it a 
very different thing from the rimed couplet of either John- 
son or Pope. 'The Deserted Village,' it should be added, 
is not a description of any actual village, but a gener- 
alized picture of existing conditions. Men of wealth in 
England and Ireland were enlarging their sheep pastures 
and their hunting grounds by buying up land and re- 
moving villages, and Goldsmith, like Sir Thomas More, 
two hundred years earlier, and likewise patriots of all 
times, deeply regretted the tendency. 

Percy, Macpherson, and Chatterton. The appearance 
of Thomson's 'Winter' in 1726 is commonly taken as 
conveniently marking the beginning of the Romantic 
Movement. Another of its conspicuous dates is 1765, the 
year of the publication of the 'Reliques [pronounced 
Relics] of Ancient English Poetry' of the enthusiastic 
antiquarian Thomas (later Bishop) Percy. Percy drew 
from many sources, of which the most important was a 
manuscript volume, in which an anonymous seventeenth 
century collector had copied a large number of old poems 
and which Percy rescued just in the nick of time, as the 
maids in the house of one of his friends were beginning to 
use it as kindling for the fires. His own book consisted of 
something less than two hundred very miscellaneous poems, 
ranging in date from the fourteenth century to his own 
day. Its real importance, however, lies in the fact that it 
contained a number of the old popular ballads (above, 
pp. 74 ff). Neither Percy himself nor any one else in 
his time understood the real nature of these ballads and 
their essential difference from other poetry, and Percy 
sometimes tampered with the text and even filled out 
gaps with stanzas of his own, whose sentimental style is 



246 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ludicrously inconsistent with the primitive vigor of the 
originals. But his book, which attained great popularity, 
marks the beginning of the special study of the ballads 
and played an important part in the revival of interest in 
medieval life. 

Still greater interest was aroused at the time by the 
Ossianic poems of James Macpherson. From 1760 to 1763 
Macpherson, then a young Highland Scots schoolmaster, 
published in rapid succession certain fragments of Gaelic 
verse and certain more extended works in poetical English 
prose which, he asserted, were part of the originals, dis- 
covered by himself, and translations, of the poems of the 
legendary Scottish bard Ossian, of the third Christian 
century. These productions won him substantial mate- 
rial rewards in the shape of high political offices through- 
out the rest of his long life. About the genuineness of 
the compositions, however, a violent controversy at once 
arose, and Dr. Johnson was one of the skeptics who vigor- 
ously denounced Macpherson as a shameless impostor. 
The general conviction of scholars of the present day is 
that while Macpherson may have found some fragments 
of very ancient Gaelic verse in circulation among the 
Highlanders, he fabricated most of what he published. 
These works, however, 'Fingal' and the rest, certainly 
contributed to the Romantic Movement; and they are 
not only unique productions, but, in small quantities, still 
interesting. They can best be described as reflections of 
the misty scenes of Macpherson 's native Highlands — 
vague impressionistic glimpses, succeeding one another in 
purposeless repetition, of bands of marching warriors whose 
weapons intermittently flash and clang through the fog, 
and of heroic women, white-armed and with flowing hair, 
exhorting the heroes to the combat or lamenting their fall. 

A very minor figure, but one of the most pathetic in 
the history of English literature, is that of Thomas Chat- 
terton. While he was a boy in Bristol, Chatterton's imagi- 
nation was possessed by the medieval buildings of the city, 
and when some old documents fell into his hands he 
formed the idea of composing similar works in both verse 
and prose and passing them off as medieval productions 
which he had discovered. To his imaginary author he 
gave the name of Thomas Rowley. Entirely successful in 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 247 

deceiving his fellow-townsmen, and filled with a great 
ambition, Chatterton went to London, where, failing to 
secure patronage, he committed suicide as the only resource 
against the begging to which his proud spirit could not 
submit. This was in 1770, and he was still only eighteen 
years old. Chatterton 's work must be viewed under sev- 
eral aspects. His imitation of the medieval language was 
necessarily very imperfect and could mislead no one to- 
day ; from this point of view the poems have no permanent 
significance. The moral side of his action need not be se- 
riously weighed, as Chatterton never reached the age of 
responsibility and if he had lived would soon have passed 
from forgery to genuine work. That he might have 
achieved much is suggested by the evidences of real genius 
in his boyish output, which probably justify Wordsworth's 
description of him as 'the marvelous boy.' That he would 
have become one of the great English poets, however, is 
much more open to question. 

William Cowper. Equally pathetic is the figure of 
William Cowper (pronounced either Cowper or Cooper), 
whose much longer life (1731-1800) and far larger literary 
production give him a more important actual place than 
can be claimed for Chatterton, though his natural ability 
was far less and his significance to-day is chiefly historical. 
Cowper 's career, also, was largely frustrated by the same 
physical weaknesses which had ruined Collins, present in 
the later poet in still more distressing degree. Cpv£D££ 
is clearl y a transition p oet, sharing largely, in a very mild 
fashion, in some of the main romantic impulses, but largely 
pseudo-classical in his manner of thought and expression. 
His life may be briefly summarized. Morbid timidity and 
equally morbid religious introspection, aggravated by dis- 
appointments in love, prevented him as a young man from 
accepting a very comfortable clerkship in the House of 
Lords and drove him into intermittent insanity, which 
closed more darkly about him in his later years. He lived 
the greater part of his mature life in the household of a 
Mrs. Unwin, a widow for whom he had a deep affection 
and whom only his mental affliction prevented him from 
marrying. A long residence in the wretched village of 
Olney, where he forced himself to cooperate in all phases 
of religious work with the village clergyman, the stern 



248 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

enthusiast John Newton, produced their joint collection of 
'Olney Hymns,' many of which deservedly remain among 
the most popular in our church song-books; but it inevi- 
tably increased Cowper's disorder. After this he resigned 
himself to a perfectly simple life, occupied with the writ- 
ing of poetry, the care of pets, gardening, and carpentry. 
The bulk of his work consists of long moralizing poems, 
prosy, prolix, often trivial, and to-day largely unread- 
able. Some of them are in the rimed couplet and others 
in blank verse. His blank-verse translation of Homer, pub- 
lished in 1791, is more notable, and 'Alexander Selkirk' 
and the humorous doggerel 'John Gilpin' are famous; 
but his most significant poems are a few lyrics and de- 
scriptive pieces in which he speaks out his deepest feel- 
ings with the utmost pathetic or tragic power. In the ex- 
pression of different moods of almost intolerable sadness 
'On the Receipt of My Mother's Picture' and 'To Mary' 
(Mrs. Unwin) can scarcely be surpassed, and 'The Cast- 
away' is final as the restrained utterance of morbid reli- 
gious despair. Even in his long poems, in his minutely 
loving treatment of Nature he is the most direct precursor 
of Wordsworth, and he is one of the earliest outspoken 
opponents of slavery and cruelty to animals. How un- 
suited in all respects his delicate and sensitive nature was 
to the harsh experiences of actual life is suggested by 
Mrs. Browning with vehement sympathy in her poem, 
'Cowper's Grave.' 

William Blake. Still another utterly unworldly and 
frankly abnormal poet, though of a still different tem- 
perament, was William Blake (1757-1827), who in many 
respects is one of the most extreme of all romanticists. 
Blake, the son of a London retail "shopkeeperT^Teceived 
scarcely any book education, but at fourteen he was ap- 
prenticed to an engraver, who stimulated his imagination 
by setting him to work at making drawings in Westminster 
Abbey and other old churches. His training was com- 
pleted by study at the Royal Academy of Arts, and for 
the rest of his life he supported himself, in poverty, with 
the aid of a devoted wife, by keeping a print-and-engrav- 
ing shop. Among his own engravings the best known is the 
famous picture of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, which 
is not altogether free from the weird strangeness that dis- 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 249 

tinguished most of his work in all lines. For in spite of 
his commonplace exterior life Blake was a thorough mystic 
to whom the angels and spirits that he beheld in trances 
were at least as real as the material world. "When his 
younger brother died he declared that he saw the released 
soul mount through the ceiling, clapping its hands in joy. 
The bulk of his writing consists of a series of 'prophetic 
books' in verse and prose, works, in part, of genius, but of 
unbalanced genius, and virtually unintelligible. His lyric 
poems, some of them composed when he was no more than 
thirteen years old, are unlike anything else anywhere, and 
some of them are of the highest quality. Their controlling 
trait is childlikeness ; for Blake remained all his life one 
of those children of whom is the Kingdom of Heaven. 
One of their commonest notes is that of childlike delight 
in the mysterious joy and beauty of the world, a delight 
sometimes touched, it is true, as in 'The Tiger,' with a 
maturer consciousness of the wonderful and terrible power 
behind all the beauty. Blake has intense indignation also 
for all cruelty and everything which he takes for cruelty, 
including the shutting up of children in school away from 
the happy life of out-of-doors. These are the chief senti- 
ments of 'Songs of Innocence.' In 'Songs of Experience' 
the shadow of relentless fact falls somewhat more percep- 
tibly across the page, though the prevailing ideas are the 
same. Blake's significant product is very small, but it 
deserves much greater reputation than it has actually 
attained. One characteristic external fact should be added. 
Since Blake's poverty rendered him unable to pay for 
having his books printed, he himself performed the enor- 
mous labor of engraving them, page by page, often with 
an ornamental margin about the text. 

Robert Burns. Blake, deeply romantic as he is by na- 
ture, virtually stands by himself, apart from any move- 
ment or group, and the same is equally true of the some- 
what earlier lyrist in whom eighteenth century poetry 
culminates, namely Robert Burns. Burns, the oldest of 
the seven children of two sturdy Scotch peasants of the 
best type, was born in 1759 in Ayrshire, just beyond the 
northwest border of England. In spite of extreme pov- 
erty, the father joined with some of his neighbors in se- 
curing the services of a teacher for their children, and the 



250 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

household possessed a few good books, including Shaks- 
pere and Pope, whose influence on the future poet was 
great. But the lot of the family was unusually hard. The 
father's health failed early and from childhood the boys 
were obliged to do men's work in the field. Robert later 
declared, probably with some bitter exaggeration, that his 
life had combined 'the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the 
unceasing moil of a galley slave.' His genius, however, 
like his exuberant spirit, could not be crushed out. His 
mother had familiarized him from the beginning with the 
songs and ballads of which the country was full, and 
though he is said at first to have had so little ear for music 
that he could scarcely distinguish one tune from another, 
he soon began to compose songs (words) of his own as he 
followed the plough. In the greatness of his later success 
his debt to the current body of song and music should 
not be overlooked. He is only the last of a long succes- 
sion of rural Scottish song- writers ; he composed his own 
songs to accompany popular airs; and many of them are 
directly based on fragments of earlier songs. None the 
less his work rises immeasurably above all that had gone 
before it. 

The story of Burns' mature life is the pathetic one of a 
very vigorous nature in which genius, essential manliness, 
and good impulses struggled against and were finally over- 
come by violent passions, aggravated by the bitterness of 
poverty and repeated disappointments. His first effort, 
at eighteen, to better his condition, by the study of sur- 
veying at a neighboring town, resulted chiefly in throwing 
him into contact with bad companions; a venture in the 
business of flax-dressing ended in disaster; and the same 
ill-fortune attended the several successive attempts which 
he made at general farming. He became unfortunately 
embroiled also with the Church, which (the Presbyterian 
denomination) exercised a very strict control in Scotland. 
Compelled to do public penance for some of his offenses, 
his keen wit could not fail to be struck by the inconsist- 
ency between the rigid doctrines and the lives of some of 
the men who were proceeding against him; and he com- 
memorated the feud in his series of overwhelming but 
painfully flippant satires. 

His brief period of dazzling public success dawned sud- 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 251 

clenly out of the darkest moment of his fortunes. At the 
age of twenty-seven, abandoning the hope which he had 
already begun to cherish of becoming the national poet 
of Scotland, he had determined in despair to emigrate to 
Jamaica to become an overseer on a plantation. (That 
this chief poet of democracy, the author of 'A Man's a 
Man for a' That,' could have planned to become a slave- 
driver suggests how closely the most genuine human sym- 
pathies are limited by habit and circumstances.) To se- 
cure the money for his voyage Burns had published his 
poems in a little volume. This won instantaneous and 
universal popularity, and Burns, turning back at the last 
moment, responded to the suggestion of some of the great 
people of Edinburgh that he should come to that city and 
see what could be done for him. At first the experiment 
seemed fortunate, for the natural good breeding with which 
this untrained countryman bore himself for a winter as 
the petted lion of the society of fashion and learning 
(the University) was remarkable. None the less the sit- 
uation was unnatural and necessarily temporary, and un- 
luckily Burns formed associations also with such boon com- 
panions of the lower sort as had hitherto been his undoing. 
After a year Edinburgh dropped him, thus supplying sub- 
stantial fuel for his ingrained poor man's jealousy and 
rancor at the privileged classes. Too near his goal to 
resume the idea of emigrating, he returned to his native 
moors, rented another farm, and married Jean Armour, 
one of the several heroines of his love-poems. The only 
material outcome of his period of public favor was an 
appointment as internal revenue collector, an unpopular 
and uncongenial office which he accepted with reluctance 
and exercised with leniency. It required him to occupy 
much of his time in riding about the country, and con- 
tributed to his final failure as^a farmer. After the latter 
event he removed to the neighboring market-town of Dum- 
fries, where he again renewed his companionship with un- 
worthy associates. At last prospects for promotion in the 
revenue service began to open to him, but it was too late ; 
his naturally robust constitution had given way to over- 
work and dissipation, and he died in 1796 at the age of 
thirty-seven. 

Burns' place among poets is perfectly clear. It is 



252 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

chiefly that of a song-writer, perhaps the greatest song- 
writer of the world. At work in the fields or in his garret 
or kitchen after the long day's work was done, he com- 
posed songs because he could not help it, because his emo- 
tion was irresistibly stirred by the beauty and life of the 
birds and flowers, the snatch of a melody which kept run- 
ning through his mind, or the memory of the girl with 
whom he had last talked. And his feelings expressed them- 
selves with spontaneous simplicity, genuineness, and ease. 
He is a thoroughly romantic poet, though wholly by the 
grace of nature, not at all from any conscious intention — 
he wrote as the inspiration moved him, not in accordance 
with any theory of art. The range of his subjects and 
emotions is nearly or quite complete — love ; comradeship ; 
married affection, as in 'John Anderson, My Jo'; reflec- 
tive sentiment; feeling for nature; sympathy with ani- 
mals; vigorous patriotism, as in * Scots Wha Hae' (and 
Burns did much to revive the feeling of Scots for Scotland) ; 
deep tragedy and pathos; instinctive happiness; delightful 
humor; and the others. It should be clearly recognized, 
however, that this achievement, supreme as it is in its own 
way, does not suffice to place Burns among the greatest 
poets. The brief lyrical outbreaks of the song-writer are 
no more to be compared with the sustained creative power 
and knowledge of life and character which make the great 
dramatist or narrative poet than the bird's song is to be 
compared with an opera of Wagner. But such compari- 
sons need not be pressed; and the song of bird or poet 
appeals instantly to every normal hearer, while the drama 
or narrative poem requires at least some special accessories 
and training. Burns' significant production, also, is not 
altogether limited to songs. 'The Cotter's Saturday 
Night' (in Spenser's stanza) is one of the perfect descrip- 
tive poems of lyrical sentiment; and some of Burns' medi- 
tative poems and poetical epistles to acquaintances are de- 
lightful in a free-and-easy fashion. The exuberant power 
in the religious satires and the narrative 'Tarn o' Shanter' 
is undeniable, but they belong to a lower order of work. 
Many of Burns ' poems are in the Lowland Scots dialect ; 
a few are wholly in ordinary English; and some combine 
the two idioms. It is an interesting question whether 
Burns wins distinctly greater success in one than in the 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 253 

other. In spite of his prevailing literary honesty, it may 
be observed, his English shows some slight traces of the 
effort to imitate Pope and the feeling that the pseudo- 
classical style with its elegance was really the highest — a 
feeling which renders some of his letters painfully af- 
fected.* 

The Novel. We have traced the literary production of 
the eighteenth century in many different forms, but it still 
remains to speak of one of the most important, the novel, 
which in the modern meaning of the word had its origin 
not long before 1750. Springing at that time into appar- 
ently sudden popularity, it replaced the drama as the pre- 
dominant form of literature and has continued such ever 
since. The reasons are not hard to discover. The drama 
is naturally the most popular literary form in periods like 
the Elizabethan when the ability (or inclination) to read is 
not general, when men are dominated by the zest for 
action, and when cities have become sufficiently large to 
keep the theaters well filled. It is also the natural form 
in such a period as that of the Eestoration, when literary 
life centers about a frivolous upper class who demand 
an easy and social form of entertainment. But the con- 
dition is very different when, as in the eighteenth and 
still more in the nineteenth century, the habit of reading, 
and some recognition of its educating influence, had spread 
throughout almost all classes and throughout the country, 
creating a public far too large, too scattered, and too 
varied to gain access to the London and provincial the- 
aters or to find all their needs supplied by a somewhat 
artificial literary form. The novel, on the other hand, 
gives a much fullerj^ ortraya Lof life than does the drama, 
and allows the much more detailed analysis of characters 
and situations which the modernTniniaTias"-comc^more and 
more to demand. 

The novel, which for our present purpose must be taken 
to include the romance, is, of course, only a particular 
and highly developed kind of long story, one of the latest 
members of the family of fiction" or the larger family of 
narrative, in prose and verse. The medieval romances, 
for example, included most of the elements of the novel, 

* For the sake of brevity the sternly realistic poet George Crabbe is 
here omitted. 



254 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

even, sometimes, psychological analysis; but the romances 
usually lacked the unity, the complex and careful struc- 
ture, the thorough portrayal of character, and the serious 
attention to the r eal pr o blems of lif e which in a general 
way distinguish the jn7deriT"~noveI7 Much the same is 
true of the Elizabethan 'novels,' which, besides, were 
generally short as well as of small intellectual and ethical 
caliber. During the Restoration period and a little later 
there began to appear several kinds of works which per- 
haps looked more definitely toward the later novel. Bun- 
yan's religious allegories may likely enough have had a 
real influence on it, and there were a few English tales 
and romances of chivalry (above, pages 184-5), and a few 
more realistic pieces of -fiction. The habit of journal writ- 
ing and the letters about London life sent by some persons 
in the city to their friends in the country should also be 
mentioned. The De Coverly papers in 'The Spectator' ap- 
proach distinctly toward the novel. They give real pres- 
entation of both characters and setting (social life) and 
lack only connected treatment of the story (of Sir Roger). 
Defoe's fictions, picaresque tales of adventure, come still 
closer, but lack the deeper artistic and moral purpose and 
treatment suggested a moment ago. The case is not very 
different with Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels,' which, besides, 
is primarily a satire. Substantially, therefore, all the ma- 
terials were now ready, awaiting only the fortunate hand 
which should arrange and shape them into a real novel. 
This proved to be the hand of a rather unlikely person, 
the outwardly commonplace printer, Samuel Richardson. 

Samuel Eichardson. It is difficult, because of the sen- 
timental nature of the period and the man, to tell the story 
of Richardson's career without an appearance of farcical 
burlesque. Born in 1689, in Derbyshire, he early gave 
proof of his special endowments by delighting his childish 
companions with stories, and, a little later, by becoming 
the composer of the love letters of various young women. 
His command of language and an insistent tendency to 
moralize seemed to mark him out for the ministry, but his 
father was unable to pay for the necessary education and 
apprenticed him to a London printer. Possessed of great 
fidelity and all the quieter virtues, he rose steadily and 
became in time the prosperous head of his own printing 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 255 

house, a model citizen, and the father of a large family of 
children. Before he reached middle life he was a valetudi- 
narian. His household gradually became a constant visit- 
ing place for a number of young ladies toward whom he 
adopted a fatherly attitude and who without knowing it 
were helping him to prepare for his artistic success. 

When he was not quite fifty his great reputation among 
his acquaintances as a letter-writer led some publishers to 
invite him to prepare a series of 'Familiar [that is, 
Friendly] Letters' as models for inexperienced young 
people. Complying, Richardson discovered the possibili- 
ties of the letter form as a means of telling stories, and 
hence proceeded to write his first novel, ' Pamela,* or Virtue 
Rewarded,' which was published in 1740. It attained enor- 
mous success, which he followed up by writing his master- 
piece, 'Clarissa Harlowe' (1747-8), and then 'The History 
of Sir Charles Granclison' (1753). He spent his latter 
years, as has been aptly said, in a sort of perpetual tea- 
party, surrounded by bevies of admiring ladies, and largely 
occupied with a vast feminine correspondence, chiefly con- 
cerning his novels. He died of apoplexy in 1761. 

At this distance of time it is easy to summarize the main 
traits of Richardson's novels. 

1. He gave form to the modern novel by shaping it 
according to a definite plot with carefully selected inci- 
dents which all contributed directly to the outcome. In 
this respect his practice was decidedly stricter than that 
of most of his English successors down to the present time. 
Indeed, he avowedly constructed his novels on the plan 
of dramas, while later novelists, in the desire to present a 
broader picture of life, have generally allowed themselves 
greater range of scenes and a larger number of charac- 
ters. In the instinct for suspense, also, no one has sur- 
passed Richardson; his stories are intense, not to say sen- 
sational, and once launched upon them we follow with the 
keenest interest to the outcome. 

2. Nevertheless, he is always prolix. That the novels as 
published varied in length from four to eight volumes is 
not really significant, since these were the very small vol- 
umes which (as a source of extra profit) were to be the 
regular form for novels until after the time of Scott. Even 

* He wrongly placed the accent on the first syllable. 



256 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

1 Clarissa, ' the longest, is not longer than some novels of 
our own day. Yet they do much exceed the average in 
length and would undoubtedly gain by condensation. 
Richardson, it may be added, produced each of them in the 
space of a few months, writing, evidently, with the utmost 
fluency, and with little need for revision. 

3. Most permanently important, perhaps, of all Rich- 
ardson's contributions, was his creation of complex char- 
acters, such as had thitherto appeared not in English novels 
but .only in the drama. In characterization Richardson's 
great strength lay with his women — he knew the feminine 
mind and spirit through and through. His first heroine, 
Pamela, is a plebeian serving-maid, and his second, Clarissa, 
a fine-spirited young lady of the wealthy class, but both 
are perfectly and completely true and living, throughout 
all their terribly complex and trying experiences. Men, on 
the other hand, those beyond his own particular circle, 
Richardson understood only from the outside. Annoyed 
by criticisms to this effect, he attempted in the hero of his 
last book to present a true gentleman, but the result is 
only a mechanical ideal figure of perfection whose wooden 
joints creak painfully as he moves slowly about under the 
heavy load of his sternly self-conscious goodness and dig- 
nity. 

4. Richardson's success in his own time was perhaps 
chiefly due to his striking with exaggerated emphasis the 
note of tender sentiment to which the spirit of his gen- 
eration was so over-ready to respond. The substance of his 
books consists chiefly of the sufferings of his heroines un- 
der ingeniously harrowing persecution at the hands of re- 
morseless scoundrels. Pamela, with her serving-maid's 
practical efficiency, proves able to take care of herself, 
but the story of the high-bred and noble-minded Clarissa 
is, with all possible deductions, one of the most deeply- 
moving tragedies ever committed to paper. The effect 
in Richardson 's own time may easily be imagined ; but it is 
also a matter of record that his novels were commonly read 
aloud in the family circle (a thing which some of their 
incidents would render impossible at the present day) and 
that sometimes when the emotional strain became too great 
the various listeners would retire to their own rooms to 
cry out their grief. Richardson appealed directly, then, 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 257 

to the prevailing taste of his generation, and no one did 
more than he to confirm its hold on the next generation, 
not only in England, but also in France and Germany. 

5. We have not yet mentioned what according to Rich- 
ardson's own reiterated statement was his main purpose in 
writing, namely, the conveying of moral and religious 
instruction. He is extremely anxious to demonstrate to 
his readers that goodness pays and that wickedness does 
not, generally even in this world (though in 'Clarissa' his 
artistic sense refuses to be turned aside from the inevi- 
table tragic outcome). The spiritual vulgarity of the 
doctrine, so far as material things are concerned, is clearly 
illustrated in the mechanically virtuous Pamela, who, even 
in the midst of the most outrageous besetments of Squire 

B , is hoping with all her soul for the triumph which 

is actually destined for her, of becoming his wife and so 
rising high above her original humble station. Moreover, 
Richardson often goes far and tritely out of his way in 
his preaching. At their worst, however, his sentimentality 
and moralizing were preferable to the coarseness which 
disgraced the works of some of his immediate successors. 

6. Lastly must be mentioned the form of his novels. 
They all consist of series of letters, which constitute the 
correspondence between some of the principal characters, 
the great majority being written in each case by the hero- 
ine. This method of telling a story requires special con- 
cessions from the reader; but even more than the other 
first-personal method, exemplified in 'Robinson Crusoe,' it 
has the great advantage of giving the most intimate pos- 
sible revelation of the imaginary writer's mind and sit- 
uation. Richardson handles it with very great skill, though 
in his anxiety that his chief characters may not be mis- 
understood he occasionally commits the artistic blunder 
of inserting footnotes to explain their real motives. 

Richardson, then, must on the whole be called the first of 
the great English novelists — a striking case of a man in 
whom one special endowment proved much weightier than 
a large number of absurdities and littlenesses. 

Henry Fielding. Sharply opposed to Richardson stands 
his later contemporary and rival, Henry Fielding. Field- 
ing was born of an aristocratic family in Somersetshire in 
1707. At Eton School and the University of Ley den (in 



258 A HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Holland) he won distinction, bnt at the age of twenty he 
found himself, a vigorous young man with instincts for fine 
society, stranded in London without any tangible means of 
support. He turned to the drama and during the next 
dozen years produced many careless and ephemeral farces, 
burlesques, and light plays, which, however, were not with- 
out value as preparation for his novels. Meanwhile he had 
other activities — spent the money which his wife brought 
him at marriage in an extravagant experiment as gentle- 
man-farmer; studied law and was admitted to the bar; 
and conducted various literary periodicals. His attacks on 
the government in his plays helped to produce the severe 
licensing act which put an end to his dramatic work and 
that of many other light playwrights. When Richardson's 
'Pamela' appeared Fielding was disgusted with what 
seemed to him its hypocritical silliness, and in vigorous 
artistic indignation he proceeded to write 'The History 
of Joseph Andrews,' representing Joseph as the brother of 
Pamela and as a serving-man, honest, like her, in difficult 
circumstances. Beginning in a spirit of sheer burlesque, 
Fielding soon became interested in his characters, and in the 
actual result produced a rough but masterful picture of 
contemporary life. The coarse Parson Trulliber and the 
admirable Parson Adams are among the famous characters 
of fiction. But even in the later part of the book Fielding 
did not altogether abandon his ridicule of Richardson. 

He introduced among the characters the 'Squire B ' 

of 'Pamela,' only filling out the blank by calling him 
'Squire Booby,' and taking pains to make him corre- 
spondingly ridiculous. 

Fielding now began to pay the penalty for his youthful 
dissipations in failing health, but he continued to write 
with great expenditure of time and energy. 'The History 
of Jonathan Wild the Great,' a notorious ruffian whose 
life Defoe also had narrated, aims to show that great mili- 
tary conquerors are only bandits and cutthroats really no 
more praiseworthy than the humbler individuals who are 
hanged without ceremony. Fielding's masterpiece, 'The 
History of Tom Jones,' followed hard after Richardson's 
'Clarissa,' in 1749. His last novel, 'Amelia,' is a half 
autobiographic account of his own follies. His second 
marriage, to his first wife's maid, was intended, as he 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 259 

frankly said, to provide a nurse for himself and a mother 
for his children, but his later years were largely occupied 
with heroic work as a police justice in Westminster, where, 
at the sacrifice of what health remained to him, he rooted 
out a specially dangerous band of robbers. Sailing for 
recuperation, but too late, to Lisbon, he died there at the 
age of forty-seven, in 1754. 

The chief characteristics of Fielding's nature and novels, 
mostly directly opposite or complementary to those of Rich- 
ardson, are these : 

1. He is a broad realist, giving to his romantic actions a 
very prominent background of actual contemporary life. 
The portrayal is very illuminating; we learn from Field- 
ing a great deal, almost everything, one is inclined to say, 
about conditions in both country and city in his time — 
about the state of travel, country inns, city jails, and 
many other things; but with his vigorous masculine na- 
ture he makes abundant use of the coarser facts of life 
and character which a finer art avoids. However, he is ex- 
tremely human and sympathetic; in view of their large 
and generous naturalness the defects of his character and 
works are at least pardonable. 

2. His structure is that of the rambling picaresque 
story of adventure, not lacking, in his case, in definite 
progress toward a clearly-designed end, but admitting 
many digressions and many really irrelevant elements. 
The number of his characters, especially in 'Tom Jones,' 
is enormous. Indeed, the usual conception of a novel in 
his day, as the word 'History,' which was generally in- 
cluded in the title, indicates, was that of the complete story 
of the life of the hero or heroine, at least up to the time 
of marriage. It is virtually the old idea of the chronicle- 
history play. Fielding himself repeatedly speaks of his 
masterpiece as an 'epic' 

3. His point of view is primarily humorous. He avow- 
edly imitates the manner of Cervantes in 'Don Quixote' 
and repeatedly insists that he is writing a mocft-epic. His 
very genuine and clear-sighted indignation at social abuses 
expresses itself through his omnipresent irony and satire, 
and however serious the situations he almost always keeps 
the ridiculous side in sight. He offends some modern 
readers by refusing to take his art in any aspect over- 



260 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

seriously; especially, he constantly asserts and exercises 
his 'right' to break off his story and chat quizzically about 
questions of art or conduct in a whole chapter at a time. 

4. His knowledge of character, that of a generous- 
hearted man of the world, is sound but not subtile, and is 
deeper in the case of men than of women, especially in 
the case of men who resemble himself. Tom Jones is 
virtually Henry Fielding in his youth and is thoroughly 
lifelike, but Squire Airworthy, intended as an example 
of benevolent perfection, is no less of a pale abstraction 
than Sir Charles Grandison. The women, cleverly as their 
typical feminine traits are brought out, are really viewed 
only from without. 

The Other Sentimentalists and Realists. Richardson 
and Fielding set in motion two currents, of sentimental- 
ism and realism, respectively, which flowed vigorously in 
the novel during the next generation, and indeed (since 
they are of the essence of life), have continued, with va- 
rious modifications, down to our own time. Of the suc- 
ceeding realists the most important is Tobias Smollett, a 
Scottish ex-physician of violent and brutal nature, who 
began to produce his picaresque stories of adventure dur- 
ing the lifetime of Fielding. He made ferociously un- 
qualified attacks on the statesmen of his day, and in spite 
of much power, the coarseness of his works renders them 
now almost unreadable. But he performed one definite 
service; in 'Roderick Random,' drawing on his early ex- 
periences as a ship's surgeon, he inaugurated the out-and- 
out sea story, that is the story which takes place not, like 
'Robinson Crusoe,' in small part, but mainly, on board 
ship. Prominent, on the other hand, among the senti- 
mentalists is Laurence Sterne, who, inappropriately enough, 
was a clergyman, the author of 'Tristram Shandy.' This 
book is quite unlike anything else ever written. Sterne 
published it in nine successive volumes during almost as 
manjr years, and he made a point of almost complete form- 
lessness and every sort of whimsicality. The hero is not 
born until the third volume, the story mostly relates to 
other people and things, pages are left blank to be filled 
out by the reader — no grotesque device or sudden trick 
can be too fantastic for Sterne. But he has the gift of 
delicate pathos and humor, and certain episodes in the 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 261 

book are justly famous, such as the one where Uncle Toby 
carefully puts a fly out of the window, refusing to 'hurt a 
hair of its head,' on the ground that 'the world surely is 
wide enough to hold both thee and me. ' The best of all the 
sentimental stories is Goldsmith's 'Vicar of Wakefield' 
(1766), of which we have already spoken (above, page 
244). With its kindly humor, its single-hearted whole- 
someness, and its delightful figure of Dr. Primrose it re- 
mains, in spite of its artlessness, one of the permanent land- 
marks of English fiction. 

Historical and 'Gothic' Romances. Stories which pur- 
ported to reproduce the life of the Past were not unknown 
in England in the seventeenth century, but the real be- 
ginning of the historical novel and romance belongs to the 
later part of the eighteenth century. The extravagance 
of romantic writers at that time, further, created a sort 
of subspecies called in its day and since the 'Gothic' ro- 
mance. These 'Gothic' stories are nominally located in 
the Middle Ages, but their main object is not to give an 
accurate picture of medieval life, but to arouse terror in 
the reader, by means of a fantastic apparatus of gloomy 
castles, somber villains, distressed and sentimental heroines, 
and supernatural mystery. The form was inaugurated by 
Horace Walpole. the son of the former Prime Minister, who 
built near Twickenham (Pope's home) a pseudo-medieval 
house which he named Strawberry Hill, where he posed as a 
center of the medieval revival. Walpole 's 'Castle of 
'Otranto, ' published in 1764, is an utterly absurd little 
story, but its novelty at the time, and the author 's prestige, 
gave it a great vogue. The really best 'Gothic' romances 
are the long ones written by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe in the 
last decade of the century, of which 'The Mysteries of 
Udolpho, ' in particular, was popular for two generations. 
Mrs. Radcliffe 's books overflow with sentimentality, but 
display real power, especially in imaginative description. 
Of the more truly historical romances the best were the 
'Thaddeus of Warsaw' and 'Scottish Chiefs' of Miss Jane 
Porter, which appeared in the first decade of the nine- 
teenth century. None of all these historical and 'Gothic' 
romances attains the rank of great or permanent literature, 
but they were historically important, largely because they 
prepared the way for the novels of Walter Scott, which 



262 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

would hardly have come into being without them, and 
which show clear signs of the influence of even their most 
exaggerated features. 

Novels of Purpose. Still another sort of novel was that 
which began to be written in the latter part of the century 
with the object of exposing some particular abuse in society. 
The first representatives of the class aimed, imitating the 
French sentimentalist Rousseau, to improve education, and 
in accordance with the sentimental Revolutionary miscon- 
ception which held that all sin and sorrow result from the 
corruptions of civilization, often held up the primitive 
savage as a model of all the kindly virtues. The most 
important of the novels of purpose, however, were more 
thorough-going attacks on society composed by radical 
revolutionists, and the least forgotten is the * Caleb Wil- 
liams' of William Godwin (1794), which is intended to 
demonstrate that class-distinctions result in hopeless moral 
confusion and disaster. 

Miss Burney and the Feminine Novel of Manners. The 
most permanent results of the latter part of the century 
in fiction were attained by three women who introduced 
and successively continued the novel which depicts, from 
the woman 's point of view, with delicate satire, and at first 
in the hope of accomplishing some reform, or at least of 
showing the beauty of virtue and morality, the contem- 
porary manners of well-to-do 'society.' The first of these 
authoresses was Miss Frances Burney, who later became 
Madame D'Arblay, but is generally referred to familiarly 
as Fanny Burney. 

The unassuming daughter of a talented and much- 
esteemed musician, acquainted in her own home with many 
persons of distinction, such as Garrick and Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, and given from girlhood to the private writing 
of stories and of a since famous Diary, Miss Burney com- 
posed her 'Evelina' in leisure intervals during a number 
of years, and published it when she was twenty-five, in 
1778. It recounts, in the Richardsonian letter form, the 
experiences of a country girl of good breeding and ideally 
fine character who is introduced into the life of London 
high society, is incidentally brought into contact with dis- 
agreeable people of various types, and soon achieves a 
great triumph by being acknowledged as the daughter of 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 263 

a repentant and wealthy man of fashion and by marrying 
an impossibly perfect young gentleman, also of great 
wealth. Structure and substance in 'Evelina' are alike 
somewhat amateurish in comparison with the novels of the 
next century; but it does manifest, together with some lack 
of knowledge of the real world, genuine understanding of 
the core, at least, of many sorts of character; it presents 
artificial society life with a light and pleasing touch; and 
it brought into the novel a welcome atmosphere of womanly 
purity and delicacy. 'Evelina' was received with great 
applause and Miss Burney wrote other books, but they are 
without importance. Her success won her the friendship 
of Dr. Johnson and the position of one of the Queen's 
waiting women, a sort of gilded slavery which she en- 
dured for five years. She was married in middle-age to a 
French emigrant officer, Monsieur D'Arblay, and lived in 
France and England until the age of nearly ninety, latterly 
an inactive but much respected figure among the writers of 
a younger generation. 

Miss Edgeworth. Much more voluminous and varied 
was the work of Miss Burney 's successor, Maria Edge- 
worth, who devoted a great part of her long life (1767- 
1819) to active benevolence and to attendance on her 
father, an eccentric and pedantic English gentleman who 
lived mostly on his estate in Ireland and who exercised the 
privilege of revising or otherwise meddling with most of 
her books. In the majority of her works Miss Edgeworth 
followed Miss Burney. writing of the experiences of young 
ladies in fashionable London life. In these novels her pur- 
pose was more obviously moral than Miss Burney 's — she 
aimed to make clear the folly of frivolity and dissipation; 
and she also wrote moral tales for children which though 
they now seem old-fashioned were long and widely popular. 
Since she had a first-hand knowledge of both Ireland and 
England, she laid the scenes of some of her books partly 
in both countries, thereby creating what was later called 
'the international novel.' Her most distinctive achieve- 
ment, however, was the introduction of the real Irishman 
(as distinct from the humorous caricature) into fiction. 
Scott testified that it was her example that suggested to 
him the similar portrayal of Scottish character and life. 

Jane Austen. Much the greatest of this trio of au- 



264 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

thoresses is the last, Jane Austen, who perhaps belongs as 
much to the nineteenth century as the eighteenth. The 
daughter of a clergyman, she past an absolutely uneventful 
life of forty- two years (1775-1817) in various villages and 
towns in Southern England. She had finished her master- 
piece, ' Pr2de_ax ; dPr^judi£e, ' at the age of twenty-two, but 
was unable for more than a dozen years to find a publisher 
for this and her other earlier works. When at last they 
were brought out she resumed her writing, but the total 
number of her novels is only six^ Her field, also, is more 
limited than that of any other great English novelist; for 
she deliberately restricted herself, with excellent judgment, 
to portraying what she knew at first-hand, namely the life of 
the well-to-do classes of her own 'provincial' region. More- 
over, her theme is always love ; desirable marriage for them- 
selves or their children seems to be the single object of 
almost all her characters; and she always conducts her 
heroine successfully to this goal. Her artistic achievement, 
like herself, is so well-bred and unobtrusive that a hasty 
reader may easily fail to appreciate it. Her undemanding 
of chara^er-4s-almjQ&L^©rfect, her sense for structure and 
dramatic scenes (quiet ones) equally good, and her quiet 
and delightful humor and ironj^ all-pervasive. Scott, with 
customary generosity, praised her 'power of rendering 
ordinary things and characters interesting from the truth 
of her portrayal, ' in favorable contrast with his own facility 
in 'the Big Bow-Wow strain.' Nevertheless the assertion 
of some present-day critics that she is the greatest of all 
English authoresses is certainly extravagant. Her novels, 
though masterly in their own field and style, do not have 
the fulness of description or the elaboration of action 
which add beauty and power to most later ones, and her 
lack of a sense for the greater issues of life denies her 
legitimate comparison with such a writer as George Eliot. 
Summary. The variety of the literary influences in 
eighteenth century England was so great that the century 
can scarcely be called a literary unit ; yet as a whole it con- 
trasts clearly enough both with that which goes before and 
with that which follows. Certainly its total contribution to 
English literature was great and varied. 



CHAPTER X 

PERIOD VIII. THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798 TO ABOUT 1830 

The Great Writers of 1798-1830. The Critical Reviews. 
As we look back to-day over the literature of the last three 
quarters of the eighteenth century, here just surveyed, 
the progress of the Romantic Movement seems the most con- 
spicuous general fact which it presents. But at the death of 
Cowper in 1800 the movement still remained tentative and 
incomplete, and it was to arrive at full maturity only in 
the work of the great writers of the following quarter 
century, who were to create the finest body of literature 
which England had produced since the Elizabethan period. 
All the greatest of these writers were poets, wholly or 
in part, and they fall roughly into two groups : first, "Wil- 
liam Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert 
Southey, and Walter Scott ; and second, about twenty years 
younger. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John 
Keats. This period of Romantic Triumph, or of the lives 
of its authors, coincides in time, and not by mere accident, 
with the period of the success of the French Revolution, 
the prolonged struggle of England and all Europe against 
Napoleon (above, page 233), and the subsequent years 
when in Continental Europe despotic government reas- 
serted itself and sternly suppressed liberal hopes and up- 
risings, while in England liberalism and democracy stead- 
ily and doggedly gathered force until by the Reform Bill 
of 1832 political power was largely transferred from the 
former small governing oligarchy to the middle class. How 
all these events influenced literature we shall see as we 
proceed. The beginning of the Romantic triumph is found, 
by general consent, in the publication in 1798 of the little 
volume of 'Lyrical Ballads' which contained the first sig- 
nificant poetry of AYordsworth and Coleridge. 

Even during this its greatest period, however, Romanti- 
cism had for a time a hard battle to fight, and a chief 
literary fact of the period was the founding and continued 

265 



266 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

success of the first two important English literary and 
political quarterlies, 'The Edinburgh Review' and 'The 
Quarterly Review, ' which in general stood in literature for 
the conservative eighteenth century tradition and violently 
attacked all, or almost all, the Romantic poets. These 
quarterlies are sufficiently important to receive a few 
words in passing. In the later eighteenth century there 
had been some periodicals devoted to literary criticism, 
but they were mere unauthoritative booksellers' organs, and 
it was left for the new reviews to inaugurate literary jour- 
nalism of the modern serious type. 'The Edinburgh Re- 
view,' suggested and first conducted, in 1802, by the witty 
clergyman and reformer Sydney Smith, passed at once to 
the hands of Francis (later Lord) Jeffrey, a Scots lawyer 
who continued to edit it for nearly thirty years. Its poli- 
tics were strongly liberal, and to oppose it the Tory ' Quar- 
terly Review' was founded in 1808, under the editorship 
of the satirist William Gifford and with the cooperation 
of Sir AA 7 alter Scott, who withdrew for the purpose from 
his connection with the 'Edinburgh.' These reviews were 
followed by other high-class periodicals, such as 'Black- 
wood's Magazine,' and most of the group have maintained 
their importance to the present day. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poets Wordsworth and 
Coleridge are of special interest not only from the primary 
fact that they are among the greatest of English authors, 
but also secondarily because in spite of their close personal 
association each expresses one of the two main contrasting 
or complementary tendencies in the Romantic movement; 
Coleridge the delight in wonder and mystery, which he 
has the power to~express with marvelous po etic suggesti ve- 
ness, and Wo rdswor th, in an extreme degree, the be lief in 
the simple^ a nd quiet f orces, both of human life and of 
Nature. 

To Coleridge, who was slightly the younger of the two, 
attaches the further pathetic interest of high genius largely 
thwarted by circumstances and weakness of will. Born in 
Devonshire in 1772, the youngest of the many children of 
a self-made clergyman and schoolmaster, he was a pre- 
cocious and abnormal child, then as always a fantastic 
dreamer, despised by other boys and unable to mingle with 
them. After the death of his father he was sent to 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 267 

Christ's Hospital, the 'Blue-Coat' charity school in Lon- 
don, where he spent nine lonely years in the manner 
briefly described in an essay of Charles Lamb, where Cole- 
ridge appears under a thin disguise. The very strict 
discipline was no doubt of much value in giving firmness 
and definite direction to his irregular nature, and the 
range of his studies, both in literature and in other fields, 
was very wide. Through the aid of scholarships and of 
contributions from his brothers he entered Cambridge in 
1791, just after Wordsworth had left the University; but 
here his most striking exploit was a brief escapade of run- 
ning away and enlisting in a cavalry troop. Meeting 
Southey, then a student at Oxford, he drew him into a 
plan for a 'Pantisocracy' (a society where all should be 
equal), a community of twelve young couples to be founded 
in some 'delightful part of the new back settlements' of 
America on the principles of communistic cooperation in all 
lines, broad mental culture, and complete freedom of opin- 
ion. Naturally, this plan never past beyond the dream 
stage. 

Coleridge left the University in 1794 without a degree, 
tormented by a disappointment in love. He had already 
begun to publish poetry and newspaper prose, and he 
now attempted lecturing. He and Southey married two 
sisters, whom Byron in a later attack on Southey some- 
what inaccurately described as 'milliners of Bath'; and 
Coleridge settled near Bristol. After characteristically 
varied and unsuccessful efforts at conducting a periodical, 
newspaper writing, and preaching as a Unitarian (a creed 
which was then considered by most Englishmen disrepu- 
table and which Coleridge later abandoned), he moved with 
his wife in 1797 to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire. Ex- 
pressly in order to be near him, Wordsworth and his sister 
Dorothy soon leased the neighboring manor-house of Al- 
foxden, and there followed the memorable year of intel-, 
lectual and emotional stimulus when Coleridge's genius 
suddenly expanded into short-lived but wonderful activity 
and he wrote most of his few great poems, 'The Ancient 
Mariner,' 'Kubla Khan,' and the First Part of ' Christabel. ' 
'The Ancient Mariner' was planned by Coleridge and 
Wordsworth on one of their frequent rambles, and was 
to have been written in collaboration ; but as it proceeded, 



268 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Wordsworth found his manner so different from that of 
Coleridge that he withdrew altogether from the undertak- 
ing. The final result of the incident, however, was the 
publication in 1798 of 'Lyrical Ballads,' which included of 
Coleridge's work only this one poem, but of Wordsworth's 
several of his most characteristic ones. Coleridge after- 
wards explained that the plan of the volume contemplated 
two complementary sorts of poems. He was to present 
supernatural or romantic characters, yet investing them 
with human interest and semblance of truth ; while Words- 
worth was to add the charm of novelty to everyday things 
and to suggest their kinship to the supernatural, arousing 
readers from their accustomed blindness to the loveliness 
and wonders of the world around us. No better description 
could be given of the poetic spirit and the whole poetic 
work of the two men. Like some other epoch-marking 
books, 'Lyrical Ballads' attracted little attention. Shortly 
after its publication Coleridge and the Wordsworths sailed 
for Germany, where for the greater part of a year Cole- 
ridge worked hard, if irregularly, at the language, litera- 
ture, and philosophy. 

The remaining thirty-five years of his life are a record 
of ambitious projects and fitful efforts, for the most part 
turned by ill-health and lack of steady purpose into melan- 
choly failure, but with a few fragmentary results standing 
out brilliantly. At times Coleridge did newspaper work, 
at which he might have succeeded; in 1800, in a burst 
of energy, he translated Schiller's tragedy ' Wallenstein ' 
into English blank verse, a translation which in the opinion 
of most critics surpasses the original ;. and down to 1802, 
and occasionally later, he wrote a few more poems of 
a high order. For a few years from 1800 on he lived at 
Greta Hall in the village of Keswick (pronounced Kesick), 
in the northern end of the Lake Region (Westmoreland), 
fifteen miles from Wordsworth ; but his marriage was in- 
compatible (with the fault on his side), and he finally left 
his wife and children, who were thenceforward supported 
largely by Southey, his successor at Greta Hall. Cole- 
ridge himself was maintained chiefly by the generosity of 
friends ; later, in part, by public pensions. It was appar- 
ently about 1800, to alleviate mental distress and great 
physical suffering from neuralgia, that he began the exces- 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 269 

sive use of opium (laudanum) which for many years had 
a large share in paralyzing his will. For a year, in 1804-5, 
he displayed decided diplomatic talent as secretary to the 
Governor of Malta. At several different times, also, he 
gave courses of lectures on Shakspere and Milton; as a 
speaker he was always eloquent ; and the fragmentary notes 
of the lectures which have been preserved rank very high 
in Shaksperean criticism. His main interest, however, was 
now in philosophy; perhaps no Englishman has ever had 
a more profoundly philosophical mind ; and through scat- 
tered writings and through his stimulating though prolix 
talks to friends and disciples he performed a very great 
service to English thought by introducing the viewpoint 
and ideas of the German transcendentalists, such as Kant, 
Schelling, and Fichte. During his last eighteen years he 
lived mostly in sad acceptance of defeat, though still much 
honored, in the house of a London physician. He died 
in 1834. 

As a poet Coleridge 's first great distinction is that which 
we have already pointed out, namely that he gives wonder- 
fully subtile and appealing expression to the Romantic 
sense for the strange and the supernatural, and indeed for 
all that the word 'Romance' connotes at the present day. 
He accomplishes this result partly through his power of 
suggesting the real unity of the inner and outer worlds, 
partly through his skill, resting in a large degree on vivid 
impressionistic description, in making strange scenes appear 
actual, in securing from the reader what he himself called 
' that willing suspension of disbelief which constitutes poetic 
faith.' Almost every one has felt the weird charm of 
'The Ancient Mariner,' where all the unearthly story cen- 
ters about a moral and religious idea, and where we are 
dazzled by a constant succession of such pictures as these : 

And ice, mast-high, came floating by, 
As green as emerald. 

We were the first that ever burst 

Into that silent sea. 

The western wave was all aflame: 

The day was well nigh done: 

Almost upon the western wave 

Eested the broad, bright sun; 

When that strange shape drove suddenly 

Betwixt us and the sun. 



270 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

'Christabel' achieves what Coleridge himself described 
as the very difficult task of creating witchery by daylight ; 
and 'Kubla Khan/ worthy, though a brief fragment, to 
rank with these two, is a marvelous glimpse of fairyland. 

In the second place, Coleridge is one of the greatest 
English masters of exquisite verbal melody, with its tribu- 
tary devices of alliteration and haunting onomatopoeia. In 
this respect especially his influence on subsequent English 
poetry has been incalculable. The details of his method 
students should observe for themselves in their study of 
the poems, but one particular matter should be mentioned. 
In 'Christabel' and to a somewhat less degree in 'The 
Ancient Mariner' Coleridge departed as far as possible 
from eighteenth century tradition by greatly varying the 
number of syllables in the lines, while keeping a regular 
number of stresses. Though this practice, as we have 
seen, was customary in Old English poetry and in the 
popular ballads, it was supposed by Coleridge and his 
contemporaries to be a new discovery, and it proved highly 
suggestive to other romantic poets. From hearing ' Christa- 
bel' read (from manuscript) Scott caught the idea for the 
free-and-easy meter of his poetical romances. 

With a better body and will Coleridge might have been 
one of the supreme English poets; as it is, he has left 
a small number of very great poems and has proved one 
of the most powerful influences on later English poetry. 

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850. William Wordsworth* 
was born in 1770 in Cumberland, in the 'Lake Region,' 
which, with its bold and varied mountains as well as 
its group of charming lakes, is the most pictur- 
esque part of England proper. He had the benefit 
of all the available formal education, partly at home, 
partly at a 'grammar' school a few miles away, but his 
genius was formed chiefly by the influence of Nature, 
and, in a qualified degree, by that of the simple 
peasant people of the region. Already as a boy, though 
normal and active, he began to be sensitive to the Divine 
Power in Nature which in his mature years he was to ex- 
press with deeper sympathy than any poet before him. 
Early left an orphan, at seventeen he was sent by his uncles 
to Cambridge University. Here also the things which most 

* The first syllable is pronounced like the common noun 'words,' 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 271 

appealed to him were rather the new revelations of men 
and life than the formal studies, and indeed the torpid 
instruction of the time offered little to any thoughtful 
student. On leaving Cambridge he was uncertain as to 
his life-work. He said that he did not feel himself 'good 
enough' for the Church, he was not drawn toward law, and 
though he fancied that he had capacity for a military 
career, he felt that 'if he were ordered to the West Indies 
his talents would not save him from the yellow fever.' 
At first, therefore, he spent nearly a year in London in 
apparent idleness, an intensely interested though detached 
spectator of the city life, but more especially absorbed in 
his mystical consciousness of its underlying current of 
spiritual being. After this he crossed to France to learn 
the language. The Revolution was then (1792) in its early 
stages, and in his 'Prelude' Wordsworth has left the 
finest existing statement of the exultant anticipations of a 
new world of social justice which the movement aroused in 
himself and other young English liberals. When the Revo- 
lution past into the period of violent bloodshed he deter- 
mined, with more enthusiasm than judgment, to put him- 
self forward as a leader of the moderate Grirondins. From 
the wholesale slaughter of this party a few months later he 
was saved through the stopping of his allowance by his 
more cautious uncles, which compelled him, after a year's 
absence, to return to England. 

For several years longer Wordsworth lived uncertainly. 
When, soon after his return, England, in horror at the exe- 
cution of the French king, joined the coalition of European 
powers against France, Wordsworth experienced a great 
shock — the first, he tells us, that his moral nature had ever 
suffered — at seeing his own country arrayed with corrupt 
despotisms against what seemed to him the cause of hu- 
manity. The complete degeneration of the Revolution into 
anarchy and tyranny further served to plunge him into a 
chaos of moral bewilderment, from which he was grad- 
ually rescued partly by renewed communion with Nature 
and partly by the influence of his sister Dorothy, a woman 
of the most sensitive nature but of strong character and ad- 
mirable good sense. From this time for the rest of her 
life she continued to live with him, and by her unstinted 
and unselfish devotion contributed very largely to his 



272 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

poetic success. He had. now begun to write poetry (though 
thus far rather stiffly and in the rimed couplet), and the 
receipt of a small legacy from a friend enabled him to de- 
vote his life to the art. Six or seven years later his re- 
sources were several times multiplied by an honorable act of 
the new Lord Lonsdale, who voluntarily repaid a sum of 
money owed by his predecessor to Wordsworth's father. 

In 1795 Wordsworth and his sister moved from the Lake 
Region to Dorsetshire, at the other end of England, like- 
wise a country of great natural beauty. Two years later 
came their change (of a few miles) to Alfoxden, the as- 
sociation with Coleridge, and 'Lyrical Ballads,' containing 
nineteen of Wordsworth's poems (above, page 267). After 
their winter in Germany the Wordsworths settled per- 
manently in their native Lake Region, at first in 'Dove 
Cottage,' in the village of Grasmere. This simple little 
stone house, buried, like all the others in the Lake Region, 
in brilliant flowers, and opening from its second story onto 
the hillside garden where Wordsworth composed much of 
his greatest poetry, is now the annual center of pilgrimage 
for thousands of visitors, one of the chief literary shrines 
of England and the world. Here Wordsworth lived fru- 
gally for several years ; then after intermediate changes he 
took up his final residence in a larger house, Rydal Mount, 
a few miles away. In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson, 
who had been one of his childish schoolmates, a woman of 
a spirit as fine as that of his sister, whom she now joined 
without a thought of jealousy in a life of self-effacing devo- 
tion to the poet. 

Wordsworth's poetic inspiration, less fickle than that of 
Coleridge, continued with little abatement for a dozen 
years ; but about 1815, as he himself states in his fine but 
pathetic poem 'Composed upon an Evening of Extraordi- 
nary Splendour, ' it for the most part abandoned him. He 
continued, however, to produce a great deal of verse, most 
of which his admirers would much prefer to have had un- 
written. The plain Anglo-Saxon yeoman strain which was 
really the basis of his nature now asserted itself in the 
growing conservatism of ideas which marked the last forty 
years of his life. His early love of simplicity hardened 
into a rigid opposition not only to the materialistic modern 
industrial system but to all change — the Reform Bill, the 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 273 

reform of education, and in general all progressive po- 
litical and social movements. It was on this abandonment 
of his early liberal principles that Browning based his 
spirited lyric 'The Lost Leader.' 

During the first half or more of his mature life, until 
long after he had ceased to be a significant creative force, 
Wordsworth's poetry, for reasons which will shortly ap- 
pear, had been met chiefly with ridicule or indifference, 
and he had been obliged to wait in patience while the 
slighter work first of Scott and then of Byron took the pub- 
lic by storm. Little by little, however, he came to his 
own, and by about 1830 he enjoyed with discerning readers 
that enthusiastic appreciation of which he is certain for all 
the future. The crowning mark of recognition came in 
1843 when on the death of his friend Southey he was 
made Poet Laureate. The honor, however, had been so 
long delayed that it was largely barren. Ten years earlier 
his life had been darkened by the mental decay of his 
sister and the death of Coleridge; and other personal sor- 
rows now came upon him. He died in 1850 at the age 
of eighty. 

Wordsworth, as we have said, is the chief representative 
of some (especially one) of the most important principles 
in the Romantic Movement; but he is far more than a 
member of any movement; through his supreme poetic ex- 
pression of some of the greatest spiritual ideals he belongs 
among the five or six greatest English poets. First, he is 
the profoundest interpreter of Nature in all poetry. His 
feeling for Nature has two aspects. He is keenly sensitive, 
and in a more delicately discriminating way than any of 
his predecessors, to all the external beauty and glory of 
Nature, especially inanimate Nature — of mountains, woods 
and fields, streams and flowers, in all their infinitely varied 
aspects. A wonderfully joyous and intimate sympathy 
with them is one of his controlling impulses. But his feel- 
ing goes beyond the mere physical and emotional delight 
of Chaucer and the Elizabethans; for him Nature is a di- 
rect manifestation of the Divine Power, which seems to 
him to be everywhere immanent in her; and communion 
with her, the communion into which he enters as he walks 
and meditates among the mountains and moors, is to him 
communion with God. He is literally in earnest even in 



274 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

his repeated assertion that from observation of Nature man 
may learn (doubtless by the proper attuning of his spirit) 
more of moral truth than from all the books and sages. To 
Wordsworth Nature is man's one great and sufficient 
teacher. It is for this reason that, unlike such poets as 
Keats and Tennyson, he so often views Nature in the large, 
giving us broad landscapes and sublime aspects. Of this 
mystical semi-pantheistic Nature-religion his ' Lines com- 
posed above Tintern Abbey' are the noblest expression in 
literature. All this explains why Wordsworth considered 
his function as a poet a sacred thing and how his intensely 
moral temperament found complete satisfaction in his art. 
It explains also, in part, the limitation of his poetic genius. 
Nature indeed did not continue to be to him, as he himself 
says that it was in his boyhood, absolutely 'all in all'; but 
he always remained largely absorbed in the contemplation 
and interpretation of it and never manifested, except in a 
few comparatively short and exceptional poems, real nar- 
rative or dramatic power (in works dealing with human 
characters or human life). 

In the second place, Wordsworth is the most consistent 
of all the great English poets of democracy, though here as 
elsewhere his interest is mainly not in the external but in 
the spiritual aspect of things. From his insistence that 
the meaning of the world for man lies not in the external 
events but in the development of character results his cen- 
tral doctrine of the simple life. Real character, he holds, 
the chief proper object of man's effort, is formed by quietly 
living, as did he and the dalesmen around him, in contact 
with Nature and communion with God rather than by 
participation in the feverish and sensational struggles of 
the great world. Simple country people, therefore, are 
nearer to the ideal than are most persons who fill a larger 
place in the activities of the world. This doctrine expresses 
itself in a striking though one-sided fashion in his famous 
theory of poetry — its proper subjects, characters, and dic- 
tion. He stated his theory definitely and at length in a 
preface to the second edition of 'Lyrical Ballads,' pub- 
lished in 1800, a discussion which includes incidentally 
some of the finest general critical interpretation ever made 
of the nature and meaning of poetry. Wordsworth de- 
clared : 1. Since the purpose of poetry is to present the 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 275 

essential emotions of men, persons in humble and rustic 
life are generally the fittest subjects for treatment in it, 
because their natures and manners are simple and more 
genuine than those of other men, and are kept so by con- 
stant contact with the beauty and serenity of Nature. 2. 
Not only should artificial poetic diction (like that of the 
eighteenth century) be rejected, but the language of poetry 
should be a selection from that of ordinary people in real 
life, only purified of its vulgarities and heightened so as to 
appeal to the imagination. (In this last modification lies 
the justification of rime.) There neither is nor can be 
any essential difference between the language of prose and 
that of poetry. 

This theory, founded on Wordsworth's disgust at 
eighteenth century poetic artificiality, contains a very im- 
portant but greatly exaggerated element of truth. That 
the experiences of simple and common people, including 
children, may adequately illustrate the main spiritual as- 
pects of life Wordsworth unquestionably demonstrated in 
such poems as 'The Reverie of Poor Susan,' 'Lucy Gray,' 
and 'Michael.' But to restrict poetry largely to such char- 
acters and subjects would be to eliminate not only most 
of the external interest of life, which certainly is often 
necessary in giving legitimate body to the spiritual mean- 
ings, but also a great range of significant experiences which 
by the nature of things can never come to lowly and simple 
persons. That the characters of simple country people are 
on the average inevitably finer and more genuine than those 
of others is a romantic theory rather than a fact, as Words- 
worth would have discovered if his meditative nature had 
allowed him to get into really direct and personal contact 
with the peasants about him. As to the proper language 
of poetry, no one to-day (thanks partly to Wordsworth) 
defends artificiality, but most of Wordsworth's own best 
work, as well as that of all other poets, proves clearly that 
there is an essential difference between the language of 
prose and that of poetry, that much of the meaning of 
poetry results from the use of unusual, suggestive, words 
and picturesque expressions, which create the essential 
poetic atmosphere and stir the imagination in ways dis- 
tinctly different from those of prose. Wordsworth's ob- 
stinate adherence to his theory in its full extent, indeed, 



276 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

produced such trivial and absurd results as 'Goody Blake 
and Harry Gill,' 'The Idiot Boy,' and 'Peter Bell,' and 
great masses of hopeless prosiness in his long blank-verse 
narratives. 

This obstinacy and these poems are only the most con- 
spicuous result of Wordsworth's chief temperamental de- 
fect, which was an almost total lack of the sense of humor. 
Regarding himself as the prophet of a supremely important 
new gospel, he never admitted the possibility of error in his 
own point of view and was never able to stand aside from 
his poetry and criticise it dispassionately. This somewhat 
irritating egotism, however, was perhaps a necessary ele- 
ment in his success ; without it he might not have been able 
to live serenely through the years of misunderstanding and 
ridicule which would have silenced or embittered a more 
diffident spirit. 

The variety of Wordsworth's poetry deserves special 
mention ; in addition to his short lyric and narrative poems 
of Nature and the spiritual life several kinds stand out 
distinctly. A very few poems, the noble 'Ode to Duty,' 
'Laodamia,' and 'Dion,' are classical in inspiration and 
show the finely severe repression and finish of classic style. 
Among his many hundreds of sonnets is a very notable 
group inspired by the struggle of England against Na- 
poleon. Wordsworth was the first English poet after Mil- 
ton who used the sonnet powerfully and he proves him- 
self a worthy successor of Milton. The great bulk of his 
work, finally, is made up of his long poems in blank- verse. 
'The Prelude,' written during the years 1799-1805, though 
not published until after his death, is the record of the 
development of his poet's mind, not an outwardly stirring 
poem, but a unique and invaluable piece of spiritual auto- 
biography. Wordsworth intended to make this only an 
introduction to another work of enormous length which 
was to have presented his views of Man, Nature, and So- 
ciety. Of this plan he completed two detached parts, 
namely the fragmentary 'Recluse' and 'The Excursion,' 
which latter contains some fine passages, but for the most 
part is uninspired. 

Wordsworth, more than any other great English poet, 
is a poet for mature and thoughtful appreciation; except 
for a very small part of his work many readers must 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 277 

gradually acquire the taste for him. But of his position 
among the half dozen English poets who have made the 
largest contribution to thought and life there can be no 
question; so that some acquaintance with him is a neces- 
sary part of any real education. 

Robert Southey. Robert Southey (1774-1843), a volu- 
minous writer of verse and prose who from his friendship 
with Wordsworth and Coleridge has been associated with 
them as third in what has been inaptly called 'The Lake 
School' of poets, was thought in his own day to be their 
equal ; but time has relegated him to comparative obscurity. 
An insatiate reader and admirable man, he wrote partly 
from irrepressible instinct and partly to support his own 
family and at times, as we have seen, that of Coleridge. 
An ardent liberal in youth, he, more quickly than Words- 
worth, lapsed into conservatism, whence resulted his ap- 
pointment as Poet Laureate in 1813 and the unremitting 
hostility of Lord Byron. His rather fantastic epics, com- 
posed with great facility and much real spirit, are almost 
forgotten; he is remembered chiefly by three or four short 
poems — 'The Battle of Blenheim,' 'My days among the 
dead are past,' 'The Old Man's Comforts' ('You are old, 
Father William,' wittily parodied by 'Lewis Carroll' in 
'Alice in Wonderland') — and by his excellent short prose 
'Life of Nelson.' 

Walter Scott. In the eighteenth century Scotland had 
contributed Thomson and Burns to the Romantic move- 
ment; now, early in the nineteenth, she supplied a writer 
of unexcelled and marvelous creative energy, who con- 
firmed the triumph of the movement with work of the first 
importance in both verse and prose, namely Walter Scott. 
Scott, further, is personally one of the most delightful 
figures in English literature, and he is probably the most 
famous of all the Scotsmen who have ever lived. 

He was descended from an ancient Border fighting 
clan, some of whose pillaging heroes he was to celebrate 
in his poetry, but he himself was born, in 1771, in Edin- 
burgh, the son of an attorney of a privileged, though not 
the highest, class. In spite of some serious sicknesses, one 
of which left him permanently lame, he was always a very 
active boy, more distinguished at school for play and fight- 
ing than for devotion to study. But his unconscious 



278 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

training for literature began very early; in his childhood 
his love of poetry was stimulated by his mother, and he 
always spent much time in roaming about the country 
and picking up old ballads and traditional lore. Loyalty 
to his father led him to devote six years of hard work to 
the uncongenial study of the law, and at twenty he was 
admitted to the Edinburgh bar as an advocate. Though 
his geniality and high-spirited brilliancy made him a 
social favorite he never secured much professional prac- 
tice; but after a few years he was appointed permanent 
Sheriff of Selkirk, a county a little to the south of Edin- 
burgh, near the English Border. Later, in 1806, he was 
also made one of the Principal Clerks of Session, a sub- 
ordinate but responsible office with a handsome salary 
which entailed steady attendance and work at the metro- 
politan law court in Edinburgh during half of each year. 
His instinct for literary production was first stimu- 
lated by the German Romantic poets. In 1796 he trans- 
lated Burger's fiery and melodramatic ballad 'Lenore,' 
and a little later wrote some vigorous though hasty ballads 
of his own. In 1802-1803 he published 'Minstrelsy of the 
Scottish Border,' a collection of Scottish ballads and 
songs, which he carefully annotated. He went on in 1805, 
when he was thirty-four, to his first original verse-romance, 
'The Lay of the Last Minstrel.' Carelessly constructed 
and written, this poem was nevertheless the most spirited 
reproduction of the life of feudal chivalry which the Ro- 
mantic Movement had yet brought forth, and its popular- 
ity was immediate and enormous. Always writing with the 
greatest facility, though in brief hours snatched from his 
other occupations, Scott followed up 'The Lay' during 
the next ten years with the much superior ' Marmion, ' ' The 
Lady of the Lake, ' and other verse-romances, most of which 
greatly increased both his reputation and his income. In 
1813 he declined the offer of the Poet Laureateship, then 
considered a position of no great dignity for a successful 
man, but secured the appointment of Southey, who was 
his friend. In 1811 he moved from the comparatively 
modest country house which he had been occupying to the 
estate of Abbotsford, where he proceeded to fulfill his am- 
bition of building a great mansion and making himself a 
sort of feudal chieftain. To this project he devoted for 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 279 

years a large part of the previously unprecedented profits 
from his writings. For a dozen years before, it should 
be added, his inexhaustible energy had found further oc- 
cupation in connection with a troop of horse which he had 
helped to organize on the threat of a French invasion and 
of which he acted as quartermaster, training in barracks, 
and at times drilling for hours before breakfast. 

The amount and variety of his literary work was much 
greater than is understood by most of his admirers to- 
day. He contributed largely, in succession, to the 'Edin- 
burgh' and 'Quarterly' reviews, and having become a se- 
cret partner in the printing firm of the Ballantyne broth- 
ers, two of his school friends, exerted himself not only in 
the affairs of the company but in vast editorial labors of 
his own, which included among other things voluminously 
annotated editions of Dryden and Swift. His productivity 
is the more astonishing because after his removal to Ab- 
botsford he gave a great part of his time not only to his 
family but also to the entertainment of the throngs of 
visitors who pressed upon him in almost continuous crowds. 
The explanation is to be found partly in his phenomenally 
vigorous constitution, which enabled him to live and work 
with little sleep; though in the end he paid heavily for 
this indiscretion. 

The circumstances which led him to turn from poetry 
to prose fiction are well known. His poetical vein was 
really exhausted when in 1812 and 1813 Byron's 'Childe 
Harold ' and flashy Eastern tales captured the public fancy. 
Just about as Scott was goodnaturedly confessing to him- 
self that it was useless to dispute Byron's supremacy he 
accidentally came across the first chapters of 'AYaverley,' 
which he had written some years before and had thrown 
aside in unwillingness to risk his fame by a venture in a 
new field. Taking it up with renewed interest, in the eve- 
nings of three weeks he wrote the remaining two-thirds of 
it ; and he published it with an ultimate success even 
greater than that of his poetry. For a long time, how- 
ever, Scott did not acknowledge the authorship of 
'AVaverley' and the novels which followed it (which, 
however, was obvious to every one), chiefly because he 
feared that the writing of prose fiction would seem un- 
dignified in a Clerk of Session. The rapidity of the 



280 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

appearance of his novels testified to the almost un- 
limited accumulation of traditions and incidents with 
which his astonishing memory was stored; in seventeen 
years he published nearly thirty 'Waverley' novels, equip- 
ping most of them, besides, with long fictitious introduc- 
tions, which the present-day reader almost universally 
skips. The profits of Scott's works, long amounting ap- 
parently to from ten to twenty thousand pounds a year, 
were beyond the wildest dream of any previous author, 
and even exceeded those of most popular authors of the 
twentieth century, though partly because the works were 
published in unreasonably expensive form, each novel in 
several volumes. Still more gratifying were the great per- 
sonal popularity which Scott attained and his recognition 
as the most eminent of living Scotsmen, of which a symbol 
was his elevation to a baronetcy in 1820. 

But the brightness of all this glory was to be pathetically 
dimmed. In 1825 a general financial panic, revealing the 
laxity of Scott's business partners, caused his firm to fail 
with liabilities of nearly a hundred and twenty thousand 
pounds. Always magnaminous and the soul of honor, Scott 
refused to take advantage of the bankruptcy laws, him- 
self assumed the burden of the entire debt, and set him- 
self the stupendous task of paying it with his pen. Amid 
increasing personal sorrows he labored on for six years 
and so nearly attained his object that the debt was actually 
extinguished some years after his death. But in the effort 
he completed the exhaustion of his long-overtaxed strength, 
and, a trip to Italy proving unavailing, returned to Ab- 
botsford, and died, a few weeks after Goethe, in 1832. 

As a man Scott was first of all a true and thorough gen- 
tleman, manly, open hearted, friendly and lovable in the 
highest degree. Truthfulness and courage were to him 
the essential virtues, and his religious faith was deep 
though simple and unobtrusive. Like other forceful men, 
he understood his own capacity, but his modesty was ex- 
treme ; he always insisted with all sincerity that the ability 
to compose fiction was not for a moment to be compared 
with the ability to act effectively in practical activities; 
and he was really displeased at the suggestion that he be- 
longed among the greatest men of the age. In spite of his 
Romantic tendencies and his absolute simplicity of char- 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 281 

acter, he clung strongly to the conservatism of the feudal 
aristocracy with which he had labored so hard to connect 
himself; he was vigorously hostile to the democratic spirit, 
and, in his later years, to the Reform Bill; and he felt 
and expressed almost childish delight in the friendship of 
the contemptible George IV, because George IV was his 
king. The conservatism was closely connected, in fact, 
with his Romantic interest in the past, and in politics it 
took the form, theoretically, of Jacobitism, loyalty to the 
worthless Stuart race whose memory his novels have done 
so much to keep alive. All these traits are made abundantly 
clear in the extended life of Scott written by his son-in- 
law, J. G. Lockhart, which is one of the two or three great- 
est English biographies. 

Scott's long poems, the best of them, are the chief ex- 
amples in English of dashing verse romances of adventure 
and love. They are hastily done, as we have said, and 
there is no attempt at subtilty of characterization or at 
any moral or philosophical meaning; nevertheless the 
reader's interest in the vigorous and picturesque action is 
maintained throughout at the highest pitch. Furthermore, 
they contain much finely sympathetic description of Scot- 
tish scenery, impressionistic, but poured out with enthusi- 
asm. Scott's numerous lyrics are similarly stirring or 
moving expressions of the primal emotions, and some of 
them are charmingly musical. 

The qualities of the novels, which represent the cul- 
mination of Romantic historical fiction, are much the same. 
Through his bold and active historical imagination Scott 
vivifies the past magnificently; without doubt the great 
majority of English readers know English history chiefly 
through his works. His dramatic power, also, at its best, 
is superb ; in his great scenes and crises he is masterly 
as narrator and describer. In the presentation of the char- 
acters there is often much of the same superficiality as 
in the poems, but there is much also of the highest skill. 
The novels may be roughly divided into three classes : first 
those, like 'Ivanhoe, ' whose scene is laid in the twelfth or 
thirteenth century; second those, like 'Kenilworth,' which 
are located in the fifteenth or sixteenth; and third, those 
belonging to England and Scotland of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth. In the earlier ones sheer romance predomi- 



282 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

nates and the hero and heroine are likely to be more or less 
conventional paragons, respectively, of courage and tender 
charm; but in the later ones Scott largely portrays the 
life and people which he himself knew; and he knew them 
through and through. His Scottish characters in particu- 
lar, often especially the secondary ones, are delightfully 
realistic" portraits of a great variety of types. Mary Queen 
of Scots in 'The Abbot' and Caleb Balderstone in 'The 
Bride of Lammermoor' are equally convincing in their 
essential but very personal humanity. Descriptions of 
scenery are correspondingly fuller in the novels than in the 
poems and are equally useful for atmosphere and back- 
ground. 

In minor matters, in the novels also, there is much 
carelessness. The style, more formal than that of the 
present day, is prevailingly wordy and not infrequently 
slipshod, though its vitality is a much more noticeable 
characteristic. The structure of the stories is far from com- 
pact. Scott generally began without any idea how he 
was to continue or end and sent off each day's instalment 
of his manuscript in the first draft as soon as it was 
written; hence the action often wanders, or even, from 
the structural point of view, drags. But interest seldom 
greatly slackens until the end, which, it must be further 
confessed, is often suddenly brought about in a very in- 
artistic fashion. It is of less consequence that in the 
details of fact Scott often commits errors, not only, like 
all historical novelists, deliberately manipulating the order 
and details of the actual events to suit his purposes, 
but also making frequent sheer mistakes. In 'Ivanhoe,' 
for example, the picture of life in the twelfth century 
is altogether incorrect and misleading. In all these mat- 
ters scores of more self-conscious later writers are superior 
to Scott, but mere correctness counts for far less than 
genius. 

When all is said, Scott remains the greatest historical 
novelist, and one of the greatest creative forces, in world 
literature. 

TChe Last Group of Romantic Poets. Coleridge, Words- 
worth, Southey, and Scott had mostly ceased to produce 
poetry by 1815. The group of younger men, the last out- 
and-out Romanticists, who succeeded them, writing chiefly 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 283 

from about 1810 to 1825, in some respects contrast strongly 
with them. Byron and Shelley were far more radically 
revolutionary; and Keats, in his poetry, was devoted 
wholly to the pursuit and worship of beauty with no con- 
cern either for a moral philosophy of life or for vigorous 
external adventure. It is a striking fact also that these 
later men were all very short-lived ; they died at ages rang- 
ing only from twenty-six to thirty-six. 

Lord Byron, 1788-1824. Byron* (George Gordon Byron) 
expresses mainly the spirit of individual revolt, revolt 
against all existing institutions and standards. This was 
largely a matter of his own personal temperament, but the 
influence of the time also had a share in it, the time when 
the apparent failure of the French Revolution had thrown 
the pronounced liberals back upon their own resources in 
bitter dissatisfaction with the existing state of society. 
Byron was born in 1788. His father, the violent and worth- 
less descendant of a line of violent and worthless nobles, 
was just then using up the money which the poet's mother 
had brought him, and soon abandoned her. She in turn 
was wildly passionate and uncontrolled, and in bringing 
up her son indulged alternately in fits of genuine tender- 
ness and capricious outbursts of mad rage and unkind- 
ness. Byron suffered also from another serious handicap ; 
he was born with deformed feet, so that throughout life 
he walked clumsily — a galling irritation to his sensitive 
pride. In childhood his poetic instincts were stimulated by 
summers spent among the scenery of his mother's native 
Scottish Highlands. At the age of ten, on the death of 
his great-uncle, he succeeded to the peerage as Lord Byron, 
but for many years he continued to be heavily in debt, 
partly because of lavish extravagance, which was one ex- 
pression of his inherited reckless wilfulness. Throughout 
his life he was obliged to make the most heroic efforts to 
keep in check another inherited tendency, to corpulence; 
he generally restricted his diet almost entirely to such 
meager fare as potatoes and soda-water, though he often 
broke out also into periods of unlimited self-indulgence. 

From Harrow School he passed to Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, where Macaulay and Tennyson were to be among 
his successors. Aspiring to be an athlete, he made him- 
self respected as a fighter, despite his deformity, by his 



284 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

strength of arm, and he was always a powerful swimmer. 
Deliberately aiming also at the reputation of a debauchee, 
he lived wildly, though now as later probably not alto- 
gether so wickedly as he represented. After three years 
of irregular attendance at the University his rank secured 
him the degree of M. A., in 1808. He had already begun 
to publish verse, and when 'The Edinburgh Review' ridi- 
culed his very juvenile 'Hours of Idleness' he added an 
attack on Jeffrey to a slashing criticism of contemporary 
poets which he had already written in rimed couplets (he 
always professed the highest admiration for Pope's poetry), 
and published the piece as 'English Bards and Scotch 
Reviewers. ' 

He was now settled at his inherited estate of Newstead 
Abbey (one of the religious foundations given to mem- 
bers of the nobility by Henry VIII when he confiscated 
them from the Church), and had made his appearance 
in his hereditary place in the House of Lords; but follow- 
ing his instinct for excitement and for doing the expen- 
sively conspicuous thing he next spent two years on a 
European tour, through Spain, Greece, and Turkey. In 
Greece he traveled, as was necessary, with a large native 
guard, and he allowed reports to become current that he 
passed through a succession of romantic and reckless ad- 
ventures. The first literary result of his journey was 
the publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of 'Childe 
Harold's Pilgrimage.' This began as the record of the 
wanderings of Childe Harold, a dissipated young noble who 
was clearly intended to represent the author himself; but 
Byron soon dropped this figure as a useless impediment 
in the series of descriptions of Spain and Greece of which 
the first two cantos consist. He soon abandoned also 
the attempt to secure an archaic effect by the occasional 
use of Spenserian words, but he wrote throughout in 
Spenser's stanza, which he used with much power. The 
public received the poem with the greatest enthusiasm; 
Byron summed up the case in his well-known comment : ' I 
awoke one morning and found myself famous.' In fact, 
'Childe Harold' is the best of all Byron's works, though 
the third and fourth cantos, published some years later, 
and dealing with Belgium, the battle of Waterloo, and cen- 
tral Europe, are superior to the first two. Its excellence 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 285 

consists chiefly in the fact that while it is primarily a 
descriptive poem, its pictures, dramatically and finely 
vivid in themselves, are permeated with intense emo- 
tion and often serve only as introductions to passionate 
rhapsodies, so that the effect is largely lyrical. 

Though Byron always remained awkward in company 
he now became the idol of the world of fashion. He fol- 
lowed up his first literary success by publishing during 
the next four years his brief and vigorous metrical ro- 
mances, most of them Eastern in setting, 'The Giaour' 
(pronounced by Byron 'Jower'), 'The Bride of Abydos, ' 
'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Siege of Corinth,' and 
'Parisina. ' These were composed not only with remark- 
able facility but in the utmost haste, sometimes a whole 
poem in only a few days and sometimes in odds and ends 
of time snatched from social diversions. The results are 
only too clearly apparent; the meter is often slovenly, the 
narrative structure highly defective, and the characteriza- 
tion superficial or flatly inconsistent. In other respects 
the poems are thoroughly characteristic of their author. 
In each of them stands out one dominating figure, the 
hero, a desperate and terrible adventurer, characterized by 
Byron himself as possessing 'one virtue and a thousand 
crimes,' merciless and vindictive to his enemies, trem- 
blingly obeyed by his followers, manifesting human ten- 
derness only toward his mistress (a delicate romantic 
creature to whom he is utterly devoted in the approved 
romantic-sentimental fashion), and above all inscrutably 
enveloped in a cloud of pretentious romantic melancholy 
and mystery. Like Childe Harold, this impossible and 
grandiose figure of many incarnations was well under- 
stood by every one to be meant for a picture of Byron 
himself, who thus posed for and received in full measure 
the horrified admiration of the public. But in spite of all 
this melodramatic clap-trap the romances, like 'Childe 
Harold,' are filled with the tremendous Byronic passion, 
which, as in 'Childe Harold,' lends great power alike to 
their narrative and their description. 

Byron now made a strangely ill-judged marriage with 
a Miss Milbanke, a woman of the fashionable world but 
of strict and perhaps even prudish moral principles. 
After a year she left him, and ' society, ' with characteristic 



286 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

inconsistency, turned on him in a frenzy of superficial 
indignation. He shortly (1816) fled from England, never 
to return, both his colossal vanity and his truer sensitive 
self stung by the injustice to fury against the hypocrisy 
and conventionalities of English life, which, in fact, he 
had always despised. He spent the following seven years 
as a wanderer over Italy and central Europe. He often 
lived scandalously; sometimes he was with the far more 
fine-spirited Shelley; and he sometimes furnished money 
to the Italians who were conducting the agitation against 
their tyrannical foreign governments. All the while he 
was producing a great quantity of poetry. In his half 
dozen or more poetic dramas he entered a new field. In 
the most important of them, 'Manfred,' a treatment of 
the theme which Marlowe and Goethe had used in 'Faust,' 
his real power is largely thwarted by the customary By- 
ronic mystery and swagger. 'Cain' and 'Heaven and 
Earth,' though wretchedly written, have also a vaguely 
vast imaginative impressiveness. Their defiant handling 
of Old Testament material and therefore of Christian 
theology was shocking to most respectable Englishmen 
and led Southey to characterize Byron as the founder of 
the 'Satanic School' of English poetry. More significant is 
the longest and chief of his satires, 'Don Juan,'* on which 
he wrote intermittently for years as the mood took him. 
It is ostensibly the narrative of the adventures of a young 
Spaniard, but as a story it rambles on formlessly without 
approaching an end, and its real purpose is to serve as an 
utterly cynical indictment of mankind, the institutions 
of society, and accepted moral principles. Byron often 
points the cynicism by lapsing into brilliant doggerel, but 
his double nature appears in the occasional intermingling 
of tender and beautiful passages. 

Byron's fiery spirit was rapidly burning itself out. In 
his uncontrolled zest for new sensations he finally tired 
of poetry, and in 1823 he accepted the invitation of the 
European committee in charge to become a leader of the 
Greek revolt against Turkish oppression. He sailed to 
the Greek camp at the malarial town of Missolonghi, where 
he showed qualities of leadership but died of fever after a 

* Byron entirely anglicized the second word and pronounced it in 
two syllables — Juan. 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 287 

few months, in 1824, before he had time to accomplish 
anything. 

It is hard to form a consistent judgment of so incon- 
sistent a being as Byron. At the core of his nature there 
was certainly much genuine goodness — generosity, sym- 
pathy, and true feeling. However much we may discount 
his sacrifice of his life in the cause of a foreign people, 
his love of political freedom and his hatred of tyranny 
were thoroughly and passionately sincere, as is repeatedly 
evident in such poems as the sonnet on 'Chillon,' 'The 
Prisoner of Chillon,' and the 'Ode on Venice.' On the 
other hand his violent contempt for social and religious 
hypocrisy had as much of personal bitterness as of dis- 
interested principle; and his persistent quest of notoriety, 
the absence of moderation in his attacks on religious and 
moral standards, his lack of self-control, and his indul- 
gence in all the vices of the worser part of the titled and 
wealthy class require no comment. Whatever allowances 
charity may demand on the score of tainted heredity, his 
character was far too violent and too shallow to approach 
to greatness. 

As a poet he continues to occupy a conspicuous place 
(especially in the judgment of non-English-speaking na- 
tions) through the power of his volcanic emotion. It was 
this quality of emotion, perhaps the first essential in 
poetry, which enrolled among his admirers a clear spirit 
in most respects the antithesis of his own, that of Matthew 
Arnold. In 'Memorial Verses' Arnold says of him: 

He taught us little, but our soul 
Had felt him like the thunder's roll. 
With shivering heart the strife we saw 
Of passion with eternal law. 

His poetry has also an elemental sweep and grandeur. 
The majesty of Nature, especially of the mountains and 
the ocean, stirs him to feeling which often results in superb 
stanzas, like the well-known ones at the end of 'Childe 
Harold' beginning 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue 
Ocean, roll'! Too often, however, Byron's passion and 
facility of expression issue in bombast and crude rhetoric. 
Moreover, his poetry is for the most part lacking in delicacy 
and fine shading; scarcely a score of his lyrics are of the 



288 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

highest order. He gives us often the blaring music of a 
military band or the loud, swelling volume of an organ, 
but very seldom the softer tones of a violin or symphony. 

To his creative genius and power the variety as well as 
the amount of his poetry offers forceful testimony. 

In moods of moral and literary severity, to summarize, 
a critic can scarcely refrain from dismissing Byron with 
impatient contempt ; nevertheless his genius and his in part 
splendid achievement are substantial facts. He stands 
as the extreme but significant exponent of violent Romantic 
individualism in a period when Romantic aspiration was 
largely disappointed and disillusioned, but was indignantly 
gathering its strength for new efforts. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1832. Shelley resembles 
Byron in his thorough-going revolt against society, but he 
is totally unlike Byron in several important respects. His 
first impulse was an unselfish love for his fellow-men, with 
an aggressive eagerness for martyrdom in their behalf; 
his nature was unusually, even abnormally, fine and sen- 
sitive; and his poetic quality was a delicate and ethereal 
lyricism unsurpassed in the literature of the world. In 
both his life and his poetry his visionary reforming zeal 
and his superb lyric instinct are inextricably intertwined. 

Shelley, born in 1792, belonged to a family of Sussex 
country gentry; a baronetcy bestowed on his grandfather 
during the poet's youth passed from his father after his 
own death to his descendants. Matthew Arnold has re- 
marked that while most of the members of any aristocracy 
are naturally conservative, confirmed advocates of the 
system under which they enjoy great privileges, any one 
of them who happens to be endowed with radical ideas is 
likely to carry these to an extreme. In Shelley's case this 
general tendency was strengthened by reaction against the 
benighted Toryism of his father and by most of the ex- 
periences of his life from the very outset. At Eton his 
hatred of tyranny was fiercely aroused by the fagging sys- 
tem and the other brutalities of an English school ; he broke 
into open revolt and became known as 'mad Shelley,' and 
his schoolfellows delighted in driving him into paroxysms 
of rage. Already at Eton he read and accepted the doc- 
trines of the French pre-Revolutionary philosophers and 
their English interpreter William Godwin. He came to 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 289 

believe not only that human nature is essentially good, 
but that if left to itself it can be implicitly trusted; that 
sin and misery are merely the results of the injustice 
springing from the institutions of society, chief of which 
are organized government, formal religion, law, and formal 
marriage; and that the one essential thing is to bring 
about a condition where these institutions can be abol- 
ished and where all men may be allowed to follow their own 
inclinations. The great advance which has been made since 
Shelley's time in the knowledge of history and the social 
sciences throws a pitiless light on the absurdity of this 
theory, showing that social institutions, terribly imperfect 
as they are, are by no means chiefly bad but rather repre- 
sent the slow gains of thousands of years of painful 
progress; none the less the theory was bound to appeal 
irresistibly to such an impulsive and inexperienced idealism 
as that of Shelley. It was really, of course, not so much 
against social institutions themselves that Shelley revolted 
as against their abuses, which were still more flagrantly 
apparent in his time than in ours. When he repudiated 
Christianity and declared himself an atheist, what he 
actually had in mind was the perverted parody of religion 
mainly offered by the Church of his time ; and, as some one 
has observed, when he pronounced for love without mar- 
riage it was because of the tragedies that he had seen in 
marriages without love. Much must be ascribed also to 
his sheer radicalism — the instinct to fly violently against 
whatever was conventionally accepted and violently to 
flaunt his adherence to whatever was banned. 

In 1810 Shelley entered Oxford, especially exasperated 
by parental interference with his first boyish love, and 
already the author of some crude prose-romances and 
poetry. In the university he devoted his time chiefly to 
investigating subjects not included or permitted in the 
curriculum, especially chemistry; and after a few months, 
having written a pamphlet on 'The Necessity of Atheism' 
and sent it with conscientious zeal to the heads of the 
colleges, he was expelled. Still a few months later, being 
then nineteen years old, he allowed himself to be led, ad- 
mittedly only through pity, into a marriage with a certain 
Harriet Westbrook, a frivolous and commonplace school- 
girl of sixteen. For the remaining ten years of his short 



290 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

life he, like Byron, was a wanderer, sometimes in straits 
for money, though always supported, after some time gen- 
erously enough, by his father. At first he tried the 
career of a professional agitator; going to Ireland he at- 
tempted to arouse the people against English tryanny by 
such devices as scattering copies of addresses from his win- 
dow in Dublin or launching them in bottles in the Bristol 
Channel; but he was soon obliged to flee the country. It 
is hard, of course, to take such conduct seriously; yet 
in the midst of much that was wild, his pamphlets con- 
tained also much of solid wisdom, no small part of which 
has since been enacted into law. 

Unselfish as he was in the abstract, Shelley's en- 
thusiast's egotism and the unrestraint of his emotions ren- 
dered him fitful, capricious, unable to appreciate any point 
of view but his own, and therefore when irritated or ex- 
cited capable of downright cruelty in concrete cases. The 
most painful illustration is afforded by his treatment of 
his first wife. Three years after his marriage he informed 
her that he considered the connection at an end and aban- 
doned her to what proved a few years of a wretched ex- 
istence. Shelley himself formed a union with Mary 
Wollstonecraft Godwin, the daughter of his revolutionary 
teacher. Her sympathetic though extravagant admira- 
tion for his genius, now beginning to express itself in 
really great poetry, was of the highest value to him, the 
more so that from this time on he was viewed by most 
respectable Englishman with the same abhorrence which 
they felt for Byron. In 1818 the Shelleys also abandoned 
England (permanently, as it proved) for Italy, where they 
moved from place to place, living sometimes, as we have 
said, with Byron, for whose genius, in spite of its coarse- 
ness, Shelley had a warm admiration. Shelley's death 
came when he was only thirty, in 1822, by a sudden acci- 
dent — he was drowned by the upsetting of his sailboat in 
the Gulf of Spezia, between Genoa and Pisa. His body, cast 
on the shore, was burned in the presence of Byron and 
another radical, Leigh Hunt, and the ashes were buried in 
the Protestant cemetery just outside the wall of Rome, 
where Keats had been interred only a year earlier. 

Some of Shelley's shorter poems are purely poetic ex- 
pressions of poetic emotion, but by far the greater part are 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 291 

documents (generally beautiful also as poetry) in his at- 
tack on existing customs and cruelties. Matthew Arnold, 
paraphrasing Joubert's description of Plato, has char- 
acterized him as 'a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating 
in the void his luminous wings in vain.' This is largely 
true, but it overlooks the sound general basis and the 
definite actual results which belong to his work, as to that 
of every great idealist. 

On the artistic side the most conspicuous thing in his 
poetry is the ecstatic aspiration for Beauty and the mag- 
nificent embodiment of it. Shelley is the poetic disciple, 
but a thoroughly original disciple, of Coleridge. His 
esthetic passion is partly sensuous, and he often abandons 
himself to it with romantic unrestraint. His ' lyrical cry, ' 
of which Matthew Arnold has spoken, is the demand, which 
will not be denied, for beauty that will satisfy his whole 
being. Sensations, indeed, he must always have, agree- 
able ones if possible, or in default of them, painful ones; 
this explains his occasional touches of repulsive morbidness. 
But the repulsive strain is exceptional. No other poetry 
is crowded in the same way as his with pictures glorious 
and delicate in form, light, and color, or is more musically 
palpitating with the delight which they create. To Shelley 
as a follower of Plato, however, the beauty of the senses 
is only a manifestation of ideal Beauty, the spiritual force 
which appears in other forms as Intellect and Love; and 
Intellect and Love as well are equal objects of his un- 
bounded devotion. Hence his sensuousness is touched with 
a real spiritual quality. In his poetic emotion, as in 
his social ambitions, Shelley is constantly yearning for the 
unattainable. One of our best critics* has observed: 'He 
never shows his full power in dealing separately with 
intellectual or moral or physical beauty. His appropriate 
sphere is swift sensibility, the intersecting line between 
the sensuous and the intellectual or moral. Mere sensa- 
tion is too literal for him, mere feeling too blind and dumb, 
mere thought too cold. . . . Wordsworth is always ex- 
ulting in the fulness of Nature, Shelley is always chasing 
its falling stars.' 

The contrast, here hinted at, between Shelley's view of 
Nature and that of Wordsworth, is extreme and entirely 

* Mr. E. H. Hutton. 



292 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

characteristic ; the same is true, also, when we compare 
Shelley and Byron. Shelley's excitable sensuousness pro- 
duces in him in the presence of Nature a very different 
attitude from that of Wordsworth's philosophic Christian- 
mysticism. For the sensuousness of Shelley gets the 
upper hand of his somewhat shadowy Platonism, and he 
creates out of Nature mainly an ethereal world of delicate 
and rapidly shifting sights and sounds and sensations. 
And while he is not unresponsive to the majestic great- 
ness of Nature in her vast forms and vistas, he is never 
impelled, like Byron, to claim with them the kinship of 
a haughty elemental spirit. 

A rather long passage of appreciative criticism* is suf- 
ficiently suggestive for quotation : 

From the world of [Shelley's] imagination the shapes of the old 
world had disappeared, and their place was taken by a stream of 
radiant vapors, incessantly forming, shifting, and dissolving in the 
'clear golden dawn,' and hymning with the voices of seraphs, to 
the music of the stars and the ' singing rain, ' the sublime ridiculous 
theories of Godwin. In his heart were emotions that responded to 
the vision — an aspiration or ecstasy, a dejection or despair, like 
those of spirits rapt into Paradise or mourning over its ruin. 
And he wrote not like Shakspere or Pope, for Londoners sitting 
in a theatre or a coffee-house, intelligences vivid enough but 
definitely embodied in a definite society, able to fly, but also able 
to sit; he wrote, or rather he sang, to his own soul, to other 
spirit-sparks of the fire of Liberty scattered over the dark earth, to 
spirits in the air, to the boundless spirit of Nature or Freedom 
or Love, his one place of rest and the one source of his vision, 
ecstasy, and sorrow. He sang to this, and he sang of it, and of 
the emotions it inspired, and of its world-wide contest with such 
shapes of darkness as Faith and Custom. And he made immortal 
music; now in melodies as exquisite and varied as the songs of 
Schubert, and now in symphonies where the crudest of Philosophies 
of History melted into golden harmony. For although there was 
something always working in Shelley's mind and issuing in those 
radiant vapors, he was far deeper and truer than his philosophic 
creed; its expression and even its development were constantly 
checked or distorted by the hard and narrow framework of his 
creed. And it was one which in effect condemned nine-tenths of 
the human nature that has formed the material of the world's great 
poems. f 

* Prof essor A. C. Bradley, 'Oxford Lectures on Poetry' (Mac- 
millan), p. 196. 

f Perhaps the finest piece of rhapsodical appreciative criticism 
written in later years is the essay on Shelley (especially the last 
half) by Francis Thompson (Scribner), 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 293 

The finest of Shelley's poems are his lyrics. 'The Sky- 
lark' and 'The Cloud' are among the most dazzling and 
unique of all outbursts of poetic genius. Of the 'Ode to 
the West Wind,' a succession of surging emotions and 
visions of beauty swept, as if by the wind itself, through 
the vast spaces of the world, Swinburne exclaims : ' It 
is beyond and outside and above all criticism, all praise, 
and all thanksgiving.' The 'Lines Written among the 
Euganean Hills,' 'The Indian Serenade,' 'The Sensitive 
Plant' (a brief narrative), and not a few others are also of 
the highest quality. In 'Adonais, ' an elegy on Keats and 
an invective against the reviewer whose brutal criticism, as 
Shelley wrongly supposed, had helped to kill him, splendid 
poetic power, at least, must be admitted. Much less satisfac- 
tory but still fascinating are the longer poems, narrative or 
philosophical, such as the early 'Alastor, ' a vague allegory 
of a poet's quest for the beautiful through a gorgeous and 
incoherent succession of romantic wildernesses ; the ' Hymn 
to Intellectual Beauty'; 'Julian and Maddalo,' in which 
Shelley and Byron (Maddalo) are portrayed; and 
'Epipsychidion, ' an ecstatic poem on the love which is 
spiritual sympathy. Shelley's satires may be disregarded. 
To the dramatic form belong his two most important long 
poems. 'Prometheus Unbound' partly follows iEschylus 
in treating the torture of the Titan who is the champion 
or personification of Mankind, by Zeus, whom Shelley 
makes the incarnation of tyranny and on whose overthrow 
the Golden Age of Shelleyan anarchy succeeds. The poem 
is a lyrical drama, more on the Greek than on the English 
model. There is almost no action, and the significance lies 
first in the lyrical beauty of the profuse choruses and 
second in the complete embodiment of Shelley's passionate 
hatred of tyranny. ' The Cenci ' is more dramatic in form, 
though the excess of speech over action makes of it also 
only a 'literary drama.' The story, taken from family 
history of the Italian Renaissance, is one of the most 
horrible imaginable, but the play is one of the most power- 
ful produced in English since the Elizabethan period. 

That the quality of Shelley's genius is unique is obvious 
on the slightest acquaintance with him, and it is equally 
certain that in spite of his premature death and all his 
limitations he occupies an assured place among the very 



294 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

great poets. On the other hand, the vagueness of his 
imagination and expression has recently provoked severe 
criticism. It has even been declared that the same mind 
cannot honestly enjoy both the carefully wrought classical 
beauty of Milton's 'Lycidas' and Shelley's mistily shim- 
mering 'Adonais.' The question goes deep and should 
receive careful consideration. 

John Keats, 1795-1821. No less individual and unique 
than the poetry of Byron and Shelley is that of the third 
member of this group, John Keats, who is, in a wholesome 
way, the most conspicuous great representative in Eng- 
lish poetry since Chaucer of the spirit of 'Art for Art's 
sake.' Keats was born in London in 1795, the first son 
of a livery-stable keeper. Romantic emotion and passion- 
ateness were among his chief traits from the start; but he 
was equally distinguished by a generous spirit, physical 
vigor (though he was very short in build), and courage. 
His younger brothers he loved intensely and fought fiercely. 
At boarding-school, however, he turned from headstrong 
play to enthusiastic reading of Spenser and other great 
English and Latin poets and of dictionaries of Greek and 
Roman mythology and life. An orphan at fourteen, the 
mismanagement of his guardians kept him always in finan- 
cial difficulties, and he was taken from school and appren- 
ticed to a suburban surgeon. After five years of study 
and hospital practice the call of poetry proved too strong, 
and he abandoned his profession to revel in Spenser, Shaks- 
pere, and the Italian epic authors. He now became an en- 
thusiastic disciple of the literary and political radical, 
Leigh Hunt, in whose home at Hampstead he spent much 
time. Hunt was a great poetic stimulus to Keats, but he 
is largely responsible for the flippant jauntiness and form- 
lessness of Keats ' earlier poetry, and the connection brought 
on Keats from the outset the relentless hostility of the liter- 
ary critics, who had dubbed Hunt and his friends 'The 
Cockney [i.e., Vulgar] School of Poetry.' 

Keats' first little volume of verse, published in 1817, 
when he was twenty-one, contained some delightful poems 
and clearly displayed most of his chief tendencies. It 
was followed the next year by his longest poem, 'Endy- 
mion, ' where he uses one of the vaguely beautiful Greek 
myths as the basis for the expression of his own delight in 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 295 

the glory of the world and of youthful sensations. As a 
narrative the poem is wandering, almost chaotic; that it is 
immature Keats himself frankly admitted in his preface; 
but in luxuriant loveliness of sensuous imagination it is un- 
surpassed. Its theme, and indeed the theme of all Keats' 
poetry, may be said to be found in its famous first line — 
'A thing of beauty is a joy forever.' The remaining three 
years of Keats' life were mostly tragic. 'Endymion' and 
its author were brutally attacked in ' The Quarterly Review ' 
and 'Blackwood's Magazine.' The sickness and death, 
from consumption, of one of Keats' dearly -loved brothers 
was followed by his infatuation with a certain Fanny 
Brawne, a commonplace girl seven years younger than 
himself. This infatuation thenceforth divided his life with 
poetry and helped to create in him a restless impatience 
that led him, among other things, to an unhappy effort to 
force his genius, in the hope of gain, into the very un- 
suitable channel of play-writing. But restlessness did 
not weaken his genuine and maturing poetic power; his 
third and last volume, published in 1820, and including 
'The Eve of St. Agnes,' 'Isabella,' 'Lamia,' the fragmen- 
tary 'Hyperion,' and his half dozen great odes, probably 
contains more poetry of the highest order than any other 
book of original verse, of so small a size, ever sent from the 
press. By this time, however, Keats himself was stricken 
with consumption, and in the effort to save his life a 
warmer climate was the last resource. Lack of sympathy 
with Shelley and his poetry led him to reject Shelley's gen- 
erous offer of entertainment at Pisa, and he sailed with 
his devoted friend the painter Joseph Severn to southern 
Italy. A few months later, in 1821, he died at Rome, at 
the age of twenty-five. His tombstone, in a neglected 
corner of the Protestant cemetery just outside the city 
wall, bears among other words those which in bitterness 
of spirit he himself had dictated: 'Here lies one whose 
name was writ in water.' But, in fact, not only had he 
created more great poetry than was ever achieved by any 
other man at so early an age, but probably no other in- 
fluence was to prove so great as his on the poets of the 
next generation. 

The most important qualities of his poetry stand out 
clearly : 



296 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

1. He is, as we have implied, the great apostle of full 
though not unhealthy enjoyment of external Beauty, the 
beauty of the senses. He once said : ' I feel sure I should 
write, from the mere yearning and tenderness I have for 
the beautiful, even if my night's labors should be burnt 
every morning and no eye ever rest upon them.' His use 
of beauty in his poetry is marked at first by passionate 
Romantic abandonment and always by lavish Romantic 
richness. This passion was partly stimulated in him by 
other poets, largely by the Italians, and especially by Spen- 
ser, from one of whose minor poems Keats chose the motto 
for his first volume : ' What more felicity can fall to crea- 
ture than to enjoy delight with liberty ? ' Shelley 's enthusi- 
asm for Beauty, as we have seen, is somewhat similar to 
that of Keats. But for both Spenser and Shelley, in dif- 
ferent fashions, external Beauty is only the outer gar- 
ment of the Platonic spiritual Beauty, while to Keats in 
his poetry it is, in appearance at least, almost everything. 
He once exclaimed, even, ' Oh for a life of sensations rather 
than of thoughts ! ' Notable in his poetry is the absence of 
any moral purpose and of any interest in present-day life 
and character, particularly the absence of the democratic 
feeling which had figured so largely in most of his Romantic 
predecessors. These facts must not be over-emphasized, 
however. His famous final phrasing of the great poetic 
idea — ' Beauty is truth, truth beauty' — itself shows con- 
sciousness of realities below the surface, and the inference 
which is sometimes hastily drawn that he was personally 
a fiberless dreamer is as far as possible from the truth. In 
fact he was always vigorous and normal, as well as sensi- 
tive; he was always devoted to outdoor life; and his very 
attractive letters, from which his nature can best be 
judged, are not only overflowing with unpretentious and 
cordial human feeling but testify that he was not really 
unaware of specific social and moral issues. Indeed, occa- 
sional passages in his poems indicate that he intended to 
deal with these issues in other poems when he should feel 
his powers adequately matured. Whether, had he lived, 
he would have proved capable of handling them signifi- 
cantly is one of the questions which must be left to con- 
jecture, like the other question whether his power of style 
would have further developed. 



THE ROMANTIC TRIUMPH, 1798-1830 297 

Almost all of Keats' poems are exquisite and luxuriant 
in their embodiment of sensuous beauty, but 'The Eve of 
St. Agnes,' in Spenser's richly lingering stanza, must be 
especially mentioned. 

2. Keats is one of the supreme masters of poetic ex- 
pression, expression the most beautiful, apt, vivid, con- 
densed, and imaginatively suggestive. His poems are noble 
storehouses of such lines as these: 

The music, yearning like a God in pain. 

Into her dream he melted, as the rose 
Blendeth its odour with the violet. 

magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 

It is primarily in this respect that he has been the teacher 
of later poets. 

3. Keats never attained dramatic or narrative power or 
skill in the presentation of individual character. In place 
of these elements he has the lyric gift of rendering moods. 
Aside from ecstatic delight, these are mostly moods of pen- 
siveness, languor, or romantic sadness, like the one so 
magically suggested in the ' Ode to a Nightingale, ' of Ruth 
standing lonely and ' in tears amid the alien corn. ' 

4. Conspicuous in Keats is his spiritual kinship with the 
ancient Greeks. He assimilated with eager delight all the 
riches of the Greek imagination, even though he never 
learned the language and was dependent on the dull medi- 
ums of dictionaries and translations. It is not only that 
his recognition of the permanently significant and beauti- 
ful embodiment of the central facts of life in the Greek 
stories led him to select some of them as the subjects for 
several of his most important poems; but his whole feel- 
ing, notably his feeling for Nature, seems almost precisely 
that of the Greeks, especially, perhaps, of the earlier gen- 
erations among whom their mythology took shape. To him 
also Nature appears alive with divinities. Walking through 
the woods he almost expects to catch glimpses of 
hamadryads peering from their trees, nymphs rising from 
the fountains, and startled fauns with shaggy skins and 
cloven feet scurrying away among the bushes. 

In his later poetry, also, the deeper force of the Greek 



298 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

spirit led him from his early Romantic formlessness to the 
achievement of the most exquisite classical perfection of 
form and finish. His Romantic glow and emotion never 
fade or cool, but such poems as the Odes to the Nightingale 
and to a Grecian Urn, and the fragment of ' Hyperion, ' are 
absolutely .flawless and satisfying in structure and ex- 
pression. 

Summary. One of the best comments on the poets whom 
we have just been considering is a single sentence of 
Lowell: 'Three men, almost contemporaneous with each 
other, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, were the great means 
of bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts 
of rhetoric and recovering for her her triple inheritance 
of simplicity, sensuousness, and passion. ' But justice must 
be done also to the 'Renaissance of Wonder' in Coleridge, 
the ideal aspiration of Shelley, and the healthy stirring 
of the elementary instincts by Scott. 

Lesser Writers. Throughout our discussion of the nineteenth 
century it will be more than ever necessaiy to pass by with little 
or no mention various authors who are almost of the first rank. 
To our present period belong: Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), au- 
thor of 'Ye Mariners of England, 7 ' Hohenlinden, ' and other spirited 
battle lyrics; Thomas Moore (1779-1852), a facile but over-senti- 
mental Irishman, author of 'Irish Melodies,' 'Lalla Rookh,' and a 
famous life of Byron; Charles Lamb (1775-1834), the delightfully 
whimsical essayist and lover of Shakspere; William Hazlitt (1778- 
1830), a romantically dogmatic but sympathetically appreciative 
critic; Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), a capricious and voluminous 
author, master of a poetic prose style, best known for his 'Con- 
fessions of an English Opium-Eater'; Walter Savage Landor (1775- 
1864), the best nineteenth century English representative, both in 
prose and in lyric verse, of the pure classical spirit, though his 
own temperament was violently romantic; Thomas Love Peacock 
(1785-1866), author of some delightful satirical and humorous 
novels, of which 'Maid Marian' anticipated 'Ivanhoe'; and Miss 
Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855), among whose charming prose 
sketches of country life 'Our Village' is best and best-known. 






CHAPTER XI 

PERIOD IX. THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, ABOUT 1830 TO 1901 

General Conditions. The last completed period of Eng- 
lish literature, almost coincident in extent with the reign 
of the queen whose name it bears (Victoria, queen 1837- 
1901), stands nearly beside the Elizabethan period in the 
significance and interest of its work. The Elizabethan 
literature to be sure, in its imaginative and spiritual en- 
thusiasm, is the expression of a period more profoundly 
great than the Victorian; but the Victorian literature 
speaks for an age which witnessed incomparably greater 
changes than any that had gone before in all the conditions 
of life — material comforts, scientific knowledge, and, abso- 
lutely speaking, in intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. 
Moreover, to twentieth century students the Victorian liter- 
ature makes a specially strong appeal because it is in part 
the literature of our own time and its ideas and point of 
view are in large measure ours. We must begin by glanc- 
ing briefly at some of the general determining changes 
and conditions to which reference has just been made, and 
we may naturally begin with the merely material ones. 

Before the accession of Queen Victoria the ' indjis&Htai 
re volution . ' the vast development of manufacturing made 
possible in the latter part of the eighteenth century by 
the introduction of coal and the steam engine, had ren- 
dered England the richest nation in the world, and the 
movement continued with steadily accelerating momentum 
throughout the period. Hand in hand with it went the 
increase of population from less than thirteen millions in 
England in 1825 to nearly three times as many at the end 
of the period. The introduction of the steam railway 
and the steamship, at the beginning of the period, in place 
of the lumbering stagecoach and the sailing vessel, broke 
up the old stagnant and stationary habits of life and in- 
creased the amount of travel at least a thousand times. 

299 



300 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The discovery of the electric telegraph in 1844 brought 
almost every important part of Europe, and eventually 
of the world, nearer to every town dweller than the near- 
est county had been in the eighteenth century; and the 
development of the modern newspaper out of the few 
feeble sheets of 1825 (dailies and weeklies in London, only 
weeklies elsewhere), carried full accounts of the doings 
of the whole world, in place of long- delayed fragmentary 
rumors, to every door within a few hours. No less striking 
was the progress in public health and the increase in human 
happiness due to the enormous advance in the sciences 
of medicine, surgery, and hygiene. Indeed these sciences 
in their modern form virtually began with the discovery 
of the facts of bacteriology about 1860, and the use of 
antiseptics fifteen years later, and not much earlier began 
the effective opposition to the frightful epidemics which 
had formerly been supposed to be dependent only on the 
will of Providence. 

Political and social progress, though less astonishing, was 
substantial. In 1830 England, nominally a monarchy, 
was in reality a plutocracy of about a hundred thousand 
men — landed nobles, gentry, and wealthy merchants — 
whose privileges dated back to fifteenth century conditions. 
The first Reform Bill, of 1832, forced on Parliament by 
popular pressure, extended the right of voting to men of 
the 'middle class,' and the subsequent bills of 1867 and 
1885 made it universal for men. Meanwhile the House of 
Commons slowly asserted itself against the hereditary 
House of Lords, and thus England became perhaps the 
most truly democratic of the great nations of the world. 
At the beginning of the period the social condition of the 
great body of the population was extremely bad. Laborers 
in factories and mines and on farms were largely in a state 
of virtual though not nominal slavery, living, many of 
them, in unspeakable moral and physical conditions. Little 
by little improvement came, partly by the passage of 
laws, partly by the growth of trades-unions. The substi- 
tution in the middle of the century of free-trade for pro- 
tection through the passage of the l Corn-Laws' afforded 
much relief by lowering the price of food. Socialism, tak- 
ing shape as a definite movement in the middle of the cen- 
tury, became one to be reckoned with before its close, 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 301 

though the majority of the more well-to-do classes failed 
to understand even then the growing necessity for far- 
reaching economic and social changes. Humanitarian con- 
sciousness, however, gained greatly during the period. The 
middle and upper classes awoke to some extent to their 
duty to the poor, and sympathetic benevolent effort, both 
organized and informal, increased very largely in amount 
and intelligence. Popular education, too, which in 1830 
had no connection with the State and was in every respect 
very incomplete, was developed and finally made com- 
pulsory as regards the rudiments. 

Still more permanently significant, perhaps, was the 
transformation of the former conceptions of the nature 
and meaning of the world and life, through the discoveries 
of science. Geology and astronomy now gradually com- 
pelled all thinking people to realize the unthinkable dura- 
tion of the cosmic processes and the comparative littleness 
of our earth in the vast extent of the universe. Abso- 
lutely revolutionary for almost all lines of thought was 
the gradual adoption by almost all thinkers of the theory 
of Evolution, which, partly formulated by Lamarck early 
in the century, received definite statement in 1859 in 
Charles Darwin 's ' Origin of Species. ' The great modifica- 
tion in the externals of religious belief thus brought about 
was confirmed also by the growth of the science of his- 
torical criticism. 

This movement of religious change was met in its early 
stages by the very interesting reactionary 'Oxford' or 
'Tractarian' Movement, which asserted the supreme au- 
thority of the Church and its traditional doctrines. The 
most important figure in this movement, who connects it 
definitely with literature, was John Henry Newman (1801- 
90), author of the hymn 'Lead, Kindly Light,' a man of 
winning personality and great literary skill. For fifteen 
years, as vicar of the Oxford University Church, Newman 
was a great spiritual force in the English communion, but 
the series of 'Tracts for the Times' to which he largely 
contributed, ending in 1841 in the famous Tract 90, tell 
the story of his gradual progress toward Rome. There- 
after as an avowed Roman Catholic and head of a monastic 
establishment Newman showed himself a formidable con- 
troversialist, especially in a literary encounter with the 



302 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

clergyman-novelist Charles Kingsley which led to New- 
man's famous 'Apologia pro Vita Sua' (Apology foji* 
My Life), one of the secondary literary masterpieces of the 
century. His services to the Catholic Church were rec- 
ognized in 1879 by his appointment as a Cardinal. 

More than one of the influences thus hastily surveyed 
combine in creating the moral, social, and intellectual 
strenuousness which is one of the main marks of the litera- 
ture of the period. More conspicuously than ever before 
the majority of the great writers, not least the poets and 
novelists, were impelled not merely by the emotional or 
dramatic creative impulse but by the sense of a message Cor 
their age which should broaden the vision and elevate the 
ideals of the masses of their fellows. The literat ure of the 
period, therefore, lacks the disinterested and joyous spon- 
taneity of, for example, the Elizabethan period, and its 
mood is far more complex than that of the partly socially- 
minded pseudo-classicists. 

While all the new influences were manifesting them- 
selves in Victorian literature they did not, of course, super- 
sede the great general inherited tendencies. This literature 
is in the main romantic. On the social side this should 
be evident; the Victorian social humanitarianism is merely 
the developed form of the eighteenth century romantic 
democratic impulse. On the esthetic side the romantic 
traits are also present, though not so aggressively as in 
the previous period; with ,j^u2iajrti£__yigQx_^ 
literature often combines exquisite, classical finish ; indeed, 
it is so eclectic and com posite that all the definite older 
terms take oh new and less sharply contrasting meanings 
when applied to it. 

So long a period naturally falls into sub-divisions ; during 
its middle part in particular, progress and triumphant 
romanticism, not yet largely attacked by scientific scep- 
ticism, had created a prevailing atmosphere of somewhat 
passive sentiment and optimism both in society and in 
literature which has given to the adjective ' mid- Victorian ' 
a very definite denotation. The adjective and its period 
are commonly spoken of with contempt in our own day 
by those persons who pride themselves on their complete 
sophistication and superiority to all intellectual and emo- 
tional weakness. But during the ' mid-Victorian ' years, 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 303 

there was also a comparative healthiness in the lives of 
the well-to-do classes and in literature which had never 
before been equalled and which may finally prove no less 
praiseworthy than the rather self-conscious freedom and 
unrestraint of the early twentieth century. 

The most important literature of the whole period falls 
under the three heads of essays, poetry, and prose fiction, 
which we may best consider in that order. 

Lord Macaulay. The first great figure, chronologically, 
in the period, and one of the most clearly- defined and 
striking personalities in English literature, is Thomas 
Babington Macaulay,* who represents in the fullest degree 
the Victorian vigor and delight in material progress, but 
is quite untouched by the Victorian spiritual striving. The 
descendant of Scottish ministers and English Quakers, 
Macaulay was born in 1800. His father was a tireless and 
devoted member of the group of London anti-slavery 
workers (Claphamites), and was Secretary of the company 
which conducted Sierra Leone (the African state for en- 
franchised negroes) ; he had also made a private fortune 
in African trade. From his very babyhood the son dis- 
played almost incredible intellectual precocity and power 
of memory. His voracious reading began at the age of 
three, when he 'for the most part lay on the rug before 
the fire, with his book on the floor, and a piece of bread- 
and-butter in his hand.' Once, in his fifth year, when a 
servant had spilled an urn of hot coffee over his legs, he 
replied to the distressed inquiries of the lady of the house, 
'Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.' From the first 
it seems to have been almost impossible for him to forget 
anything which had ever found lodgment in, or even 
passed through, his mind. His childish production of both 
verse and prose was immense. These qualities and accom- 
plishments, however, did not make him a prig. Both as 
child and as man, though he was aggressive and showed 
the prejudices of his class, he was essentially natural and 
unaffected ; and as man he was one of the most cordial and 
affectionate of companions, lavish of his time with his 
friends, and one of the most interesting of conversational- 
ists. As he grew toward maturity he proved unique in his 

* The details of Macaulay 's life are known from the famous 
biography of him by his nephew, Sir George Trevelyan. 



304 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

manner, as well as in his power, of reading. It is said 
that he read books faster than other people skimmed them, 
and skimmed them as fast as any one else could turn the 
leaves, this, however, without superficiality. One of the 
habits of his middle life was to walk through London, 
even the most crowded parts, 'as fast as other people 
walked, and reading a book a great deal faster than any- 
body else could read.' His remarkable endowments, how- 
ever, were largely counterbalanced by his deficiency in the 
spiritual sense. This appears most seriously in his writ- 
ings, but it shows itself also in his personal tastes. For 
Nature he cared little ; like Dr. Johnson he ' found London 
the place for him. ' One occasion when he remarked on the 
playing of 'God save the Queen' is said to have been the 
only one when he ever appeared to distinguish one tune 
from another. Even on the material side of life he had 
limitations very unusual in an English gentleman. Ex- 
cept for walking, which might almost be called a main 
occupation with him, he neither practised nor cared for 
any form of athletic exercise, 'could neither swim nor row 
nor drive nor skate nor shoot,' nor scarcely ride. 

From private schools Macaulay proceeded to Trinity 
College, Cambridge, where he remained through the seven 
years required for the Master's degree. In spite of his 
aversion for mathematics, he finally won a 'lay' fellowship, 
which did not involve residence at the University nor any 
other obligation, but which almost sufficed for his support 
during the seven years of its duration. At this time his 
father failed in his business, and during several years 
Macaulay was largely occupied with the heavy task of 
reestablishing it and paying the creditors. In college he 
had begun to write in prose and verse for the public 
literary magazines, and in 1825 appeared his essay on 
Milton, the first of the nearly forty literary, historical, and 
biographical essays which during the next thirty years or 
more he contributed to 'The Edinburgh Review.' He also 
nominally studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1826, 
but he took no interest in the profession. In 1828 he was 
made a Commissioner of Bankruptcy and in 1830 he at- 
tained the immediate object of his ambition by receiving 
from a nobleman who controlled it a seat in Parliament. 
Here he at once distinguished himself as orator and worker. 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 305 

Heart and soul a Liberal, lie took a prominent part in 
the passage of the first Reform Bill, of 1832, living at the 
same time a busy social life in titled society. The Ministry 
rewarded his services with a position on the Board of 
Control, which represented the government in its relations 
with the East India Company, and in 1834, in order to 
earn the fortune which seemed to him essential to his con- 
tinuance in the unremunerative career of public life, he 
accepted the position of legal adviser to the Supreme 
Council of India, which carried with it a seat in that 
Council and a salary of £10,000 a year. During the three 
months' voyage to India he 'devoured' and in many cases 
copiously annotated a vast number of books in 'Greek, 
Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and English; folios, quar- 
tos, octavos, and duodecimos.' Under the pressure of 
actual necessity he now mastered the law, and the most 
important parts of the astonishing mass of work that he 
performed during his three and a half years in India con- 
sisted in redrafting the penal code and in helping to 
organize education. 

Soon after his return to England he was elected to Par- 
liament as member for Edinburgh, and for two years he 
was in the Cabinet. Somewhat later the publication of 
his 'Lays of Ancient Rome' and of his collected essays 
brought him immense fame as a writer, and in 1817 his 
defeat at Edinburgh for reelection to Parliament gave him 
time for concentrated labor on the 'History of England' 
which he had already begun as his crowning work. To 
it he thenceforth devoted most of his energies, reading 
and sifting the whole mass of available source-material 
and visiting the scenes of the chief historical events. The 
popular success of the five volumes which he succeeded in 
preparing and published at intervals was enormous. In 
1852 he was reelected to Parliament at Edinburgh, but ill- 
health resulting from his long-continued excessive ex- 
penditure of energy warned him that he had not long to 
live. He was made a baron in 1857 and died in 1859, 
deeply mourned both because of his manly character and 
because with him perished mostly unrecorded a knowledge 
of the facts of English history more minute, probably, than 
that of any one else who has ever lived. 

Macaulay never married, but, warm-hearted as he was, 



306 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

always lived largely in his affection for his sisters and for 
the children of one of them, Lady Trevelyan. In his 
public life he displayed as an individual a fearless and 
admirable devotion to principle, modified somewhat by the 
practical politician's devotion to party. From every point 
of view, his character was remarkable, though bounded by 
his very definite limitations. 

Least noteworthy among Macaulay's works are his poems, 
of which the 'Lays of Ancient Rome' are chief. Here his 
purpose is to embody his conception of the heroic historical 
ballads which must have been current among the early 
Romans as among the medieval English — to recreate these 
ballads for modern readers. For this sort of verse 
Macaulay's temperament was precisely adapted, and the 
'Lays' present the simple characters, scenes, and ideals of 
the early Roman republican period with a sympathetic 
vividness and in stirring rhythms which give them an un- 
limited appeal to boys. None the less the 'Lays' really 
make nothing else so clear as that in the true sense of the 
word Macaulay was not at all a poet. They show abso- 
lutely nothing of the finer feeling which adds so much, 
for example, to the descriptions in Scott's somewhat sim- 
ilar romances, and they are separated by all the breadth 
of the world from the realm of delicate sensation and 
imagination to which Spenser and Keats and all the 
genuine poets are native-born. 

The power of Macaulay's prose works, as no critic has 
failed to note, rests on his genius as an orator. For ora- 
tory he was rarely endowed. The composition of a speech 
was for him a matter of a few hours ; with almost preter- 
natural mental activity he organized and sifted the ma- 
terial, commonly as he paced up and down his garden or 
his room; then, the whole ready, nearly verbatim, in his 
mind, he would pass to the House of Commons to hold his 
colleagues spell-bound during several hours of fervid elo- 
quence. Gladstone testified that the announcement of 
Macaulay's intention to speak was 'like a trumpet call to 
fill the benches.' The great qualities, then, of his essays 
and his 'History' are those which give success to the best 
sort of popular oratory — dramatic vividness and clearness, 
positiveness, and vigorous movement and interest. He 
realizes characters and situations, on the external side, 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 307 

completely, and conveys his impression to his readers 
with scarcely any diminution of force. Of expository 
structure he is almost as great a master as Burke, though 
in his essays and 'History' the more concrete nature of his 
material makes him prevailingly a narrator. He sees and 
presents his subjects as wholes, enlivening them with real- 
istic details and pictures, but keeping the subordinate parts 
subordinate and disposing of the less important events in 
rapid summaries. Of clear and trenchant, though metal- 
lic, narrative and expository style he is a master. His sen- 
tences, whether long or short, are always lucid; he knows 
the full value of a short sentence suddenly snapped out 
after a prolonged period; and no other writer has ever 
made such frequent and striking (though somewhat mo- 
notonous) use of deliberate oratorical balance of clauses 
and strong antithesis, or more illuminating use of vivid 
resumes. The best of his essays, like those on the Earl of 
Chatham and on the two men who won India for Eng- 
land, Clive and Warren Hastings, are models of the com- 
paratively brief comprehensive dissertation of the form 
employed by Johnson in his 'Lives of the Poets.' 

Macaulay, however, manifests the defects even of his 
virtues. His positiveness, fascinating and effective as it 
is for an uncritical reader, carries with it extreme self- 
confidence and dogmatism, which render him violently 
intolerant of any interpretations of characters and events 
except those that he has formed, and formed sometimes 
hastily and with prejudice. The very clearness and bril- 
liancy of his style are often obtained at the expense of 
real truth; for the force of his sweeping statements and 
his balanced antitheses often requires much heightening or 
even distortion of the facts ; in making each event and each 
character stand out in the plainest outline he has often 
stripped it of its background of qualifying circumstances. 

These specific limitations, it will be evident, are out- 
growths of his great underlying deficiency — the deficiency 
in spiritual feeling and insight. Macaulay is a masterly 
limner of the external side of life, but he is scarcely con- 
scious of the interior world in which the finer spirits live 
and work out their destinies. Carlyle's description of his 
appearance is significant: 'I noticed the homely Norse 
features that you find everywhere in the Western Isles, and 



308 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

I thought to myself, "Well, any one can see that you are 
an honest, good sort of fellow, made out of oatmeal." ' 
Macaulay's eminently clear, rapid, and practical mind 
comprehended fully and respected whatever could be seen 
and understood by the intellect; things of more subtle 
nature he generally disbelieved in or dismissed with con- 
tempt. In dealing with complex or subtle characters he 
cannot reveal the deeper spiritual motives from which 
their action sprang; and in his view of history he does 
not include the underlying and controlling spiritual forces. 
Macaulay was the most brilliant of those whom the Germans 
have named Philistines, the people for whom life consists 
of material things; specifically he was the representative 
of the great body of middle-class early-Victorian liberals, 
enthusiastically convinced that in the triumphs of the 
Liberal party, of democracy, and of mechanical invention, 
the millennium was being rapidly realized. Macaulay wrote 
a fatal indictment of himself when in praising Bacon as 
the father of modern science he depreciated Plato, the 
idealist. Plato's philosophy, said Macaulay, 'began in 
words and ended in words,' and he added that 'an acre in 
Middlesex is better than a peerage in Utopia.' In his 
literary and personal essays, therefore, such as the famous 
ones on Milton and Bacon, which belong early in his 
career, all his immense reading did not suffice to produce 
sympathetic and sensitive judgments; there is often more 
pretentiousness of style than significance of interpretation. 
In later life he himself frankly expressed regret that he 
had ever written these essays. 

Macaulay's 'History of England' shows to some degree 
the same faults as the essays, but here they are largely cor- 
rected by the enormous labor which he devoted to the 
work. His avowed purpose was to combine with scientific 
accuracy the vivid picturesqueness of fiction, and to ' super- 
sede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young 
ladies. ' His method was that of an unprecedented fulness 
of details which produces a crowded pageant of events and 
characters extremely minute but marvelously lifelike. 
After three introductory chapters which sketch the his- 
tory of England down to the death of Charles II, more than 
four large volumes are occupied with the following seven- 
teen years; and yet Macaulay had intended to continue 






THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 309 

to the death of George IV, nearly a hundred and thirty 
years later. For absolute truthfulness of detail the 'His- 
tory' cannot always be depended on, but to the general 
reader its great literary merits are likely to seem full 
compensation for its inaccuracies. 

Thomas Carlyle. The intense spiritual striving which 
was so foreign to Macaulay's practical nature first appears 
among the Victorians in the Scotsman Thomas Carlyle, a 
social and religious prophet, lay-preacher, and prose-poet, 
one of the most eccentric but one of the most stimulating 
of all English writers. The descendant of a warlike Scot- 
tish Border clan and the son of a stone-mason who is 
described as 'an awful fighter,' Carlyle was born in 1795 
in the village of Ecclefechan, just across the line from 
England, and not far from Burns' county of Ayr. His 
fierce, intolerant, melancholy, and inwardly sensitive 
spirit, together with his poverty, rendered him miserable 
throughout his school days, though he secured, through 
his father's sympathy, a sound elementary education. He 
tramped on foot the ninety miles from Ecclefechan to 
Edinburgh University, and remained there for four years; 
but among the subjects of study he cared only for mathe- 
matics, and he left at the age of seventeen without receiv- 
ing a degree. From this time for many years his life was 
a painful struggle, a struggle to earn his living, to make 
a place in the world, and to find himself in the midst of 
his spiritual doubts and the physical distress caused by 
lifelong dyspepsia and insomnia. For some years and in 
various places he taught school and received private pupils, 
for very meager wages, latterly in Edinburgh, where he 
also did literary hack-work. He had planned at first to be 
a minister, but the unorthodoxy of his opinions rendered 
this impossible; and he also studied law only to abandon 
it. One of the most important forces in this period of 
his slow preparation was his study of German and his 
absorption of the idealistic philosophy of Kant, Schelling. 
and Fiehte, of the broad philosophic influence of Goethe, 
and the subtile influence of Richter. A direct result was 
his later very fruitful continuation of Coleridge's work 
in turning the attention of Englishmen to German thought 
and literature. In 1821 he passed through a sudden 
spiritual crisis, when as he was traversing Leith Walk 



310 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in Edinburgh his then despairing view of the Universe 
as a soulless but hostile mechanism all at once gave way 
to a mood of courageous self-assertion. He afterward 
looked on this experience as a spiritual new birth, and 
describes it under assumed names at the end of the great 
chapter in 'Sartor Resartus' on 'The Everlasting No.' 

In 1825 his first important work, a 'Life of Schiller,' 
was published, and in 1826 he was married to Miss Jane 
Welsh. She was a brilliant but quiet woman, of social 
station higher than his; for some years he had been acting 
as counselor in her reading and intellectual development. 
No marriage in English Literature has been more dis- 
cussed, a result, primarily, of the publication by Carlyle's 
friend and literary executor, the historian J. A. Froude, 
of Carlyle's autobiographical Reminiscences and Letters. 
After Mrs. Carlyle's death Carlyle blamed himself bitterly 
for inconsiderateness toward her, and it is certain that his 
erratic and irritable temper, partly exasperated by long 
disappointment and by constant physical misery, that his 
peasant-bred lack of delicacy, and his absorption in his 
work, made a perpetual and vexatious strain on Mrs. 
Carlyle's forbearance throughout the forty years of their 
life together. The evidence, however, does not show that 
the marriage was on the whole really unfortunate or in- 
deed that it was not mainly a happy one. 

For six years beginning in 1828 the Carlyles lived on 
(though they did not themselves carry on) the lonely farm 
of Craigenputtock, the property of Mrs. Carlyle. This 
was for both of them a period of external hardship, and 
they were chiefly dependent on the scanty income from 
Carlyle's laborious work on periodical essays (among which 
was the fine-spirited one on Burns). Here Carlyle also 
wrote the first of his chief works, 'Sartor Resartus,' for 
which, in 1833-4, he finally secured publication, in 'Fraser's 
Magazine,' to the astonishment and indignation of most 
of the readers. The title means 'The Tailor Retailored,' 
and the book purports to be an account of the life of a 
certain mysterious German, Professor Teufelsdrockh (pro- 
nounced Toyfelsdreck) and of a book of his on The 
Philosophy of Clothes. Of course this is allegorical, and 
Teufelsdrockh is really Carlyle, who, sheltering himself 
under the disguise, and accepting only editorial responsi- 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 311 



bility, is enabled to narrate his own spiritual struggles 
and to enunciate his deepest convictions, sometimes, when 
they are likely to offend his readers, with a pretense of dis- 
approval. The Clothes metaphor (borrowed from Swift) 
sets forth the central mystical or spiritual principle toward 
which German philosophy had helped Carlyle, the idea, 
namely, that all material things, including all the customs 
and forms of society, such as government and formalized 
religion, are merely the comparatively insignificant gar- 
ments of the spiritual reality and the spiritual life on 
which men should center their attention. Even Time and 
Space and the whole material world are only the shadows 
of the true Reality, the spiritual Being that cannot perish. 
Carlyle has learned to repudiate, and he would have others 
repudiate, 'The Everlasting No,' the materialistic attitude 
of unfaith in God and the spiritual world, and he pro- 
claims 'The Everlasting Yea,' wherein are affirmed the 
significance of life as a means of developing character and 
the necessity of accepting life and its requirements with 
manly self-reliance and moral energy. 'Seek not Happi- 
ness,' Carlyle cries, 'but Blessedness. Love not pleasure; 
love God.' 

This is the central purport of the book. In the second 
place and as a natural corollary Carlyle vigorously de- 
nounces, throughout, all shams and hypocrisies, the results 
of inert or dishonest adherence to outgrown ideas or 
customs. He attacks, for instance, all empty ostentation ; 
war, as both foolish and wicked; and the existing condi- 
tion of society with its terrible contrast between the rich 
and the poor. 

Again, he urges still a third of the doctrines which were 
to prove most characteristic of him, that Gospel of Work 
which had been proclaimed so forcibly, from different 
premises, five hundred years before by those other un- 
compromising Puritans, the authors of 'Piers Plowman.' 
In courageous work, Carlyle declares, work whether phys- 
ical or mental, lies the way of salvation not only for pam- 
pered idlers but for sincere souls who are perplexed and 
wearied with over-much meditation on the mysteries of 
the universe. 'Be no longer a Chaos,' he urges, 'but a 
World, or even Worldkin. Produce ! Produce ! Were it 
but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, 



312 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast 
in thee : out with it, then. Up, up ! Whatsoever thy 
hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work 
while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein 
no man can work.' 

It will probably now be evident that the mainspring 
of the undeniable and volcanic power of ' Sartor Resartus ' 
(and the same is true of Carlyle's other chief works) is 
a tremendous moral conviction and fervor. Carlyle is ec- 
centric and perverse — more so in 'Sartor Resartus' than 
elsewhere — but he is on fire with his message and he is as 
confident as any Hebrew prophet that it is the message 
most necessary for his generation. One may like him or 
be repelled by him, but a careful reader cannot remain 
unmoved by his personality and his ideas. 

One of his most striking eccentricities is the remarkable 
style which he deliberately invented for 'Sartor Resartus' 
and used thenceforth in all his writings (though not always 
in so extreme a form). Some of the specific peculiarities 
of this style are taken over, with exaggeration, from Ger- 
man usage ; some are Biblical or other archaisms ; others 
spring mainly from Carlyle's own amazing mind. His 
purpose in employing, in the denunciation of shams and 
insincerities, a form itself so far removed from directness 
and simplicity was in part, evidently, to shock people into 
attention; but after all, the style expresses appropriately 
his genuine sense of the incoherence and irony of life, his 
belief that truth can be attained only by agonizing effort, 
and his contempt for intellectual and spiritual common- 
placeness. 

In 1834 Carlyle moved to London, to a house in Cheyne 
(pronounced Cheeny) Row, Chelsea, where he lived for 
his remaining nearly fifty years. Though he continued 
henceforth in large part to reiterate the ideas of 'Sartor 
Resartus,' he now turned from biography, essays, and 
literary criticism to history, and first published 'The 
French Revolution.' He had almost decided in despair to 
abandon literature, and had staked his fortune on this 
work ; but when the first volume was accidentally destroyed 
in manuscript he proceeded with fine courage to rewrite 
it, and he published the whole book in 1837. It brought 
him the recognition which he sought. Like 'Sartor Resar- 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 313 

tus' it has much subjective coloring, which here results 
in exaggeration of characters and situations, and much 
fantasy and grotesqueness of expression; but as a dra- 
matic and pictorial vivification of a great historic movement 
it was and remains unique, and on the whole no history is 
more brilliantly enlightening and profoundly instructive. 
Here, as in most of his later works, Caryle throws the em- 
phasis on the power of great personalities. During the 
next years he took advantage of his success by giving 
courses of lectures on literature and history, though he 
disliked the task and felt himself unqualified as a speaker. 
Of these courses the most important was that on 'Heroes 
and Hero- Worship, ' in which he clearly stated the doctrine 
on which thereafter he laid increasing stress, that the 
strength of humanity is in its strong men, the natural 
leaders, equipped to rule by power of intellect, of spirit, 
and of executive force. Control by them is government by 
the fit, whereas modern democracy is government by the 
unfit. Carlyle called democracy 'mobocracy' and con- 
sidered it a mere bad piece of social and political ma- 
chinery, or, in his own phrase, a mere 'Morrison's pill,' 
foolishly expected to cure all evils at one gulp. Later on 
Carlyle came to express this view, like all his others, with 
much violence, but it is worthy of serious consideration, 
not least in twentieth century America. 

Of Carlyle 's numerous later works the most important 
are 'Past and Present,' in which he contrasts the efficiency 
of certain strong men of medieval Europe with the rest- 
lessness and uncertainty of contemporary democracy and 
humanitarianism and attacks modern political economy; 
'Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches,' which revolu- 
tionized the general opinion of Cromwell, revealing him 
as a true hero or strong man instead of a hypocritical 
fanatic; and 'The History of Frederick the Great,' an 
enormous work which occupied Carlyle for fourteen years 
and involved thorough personal examination of the scenes 
of Frederick's life and battles. During his last fifteen years 
Carlyle wrote little of importance, and the violence of 
his denunciation of modern life grew shrill and hysterical. 
That society was sadly wrong he was convinced, but he 
propounded no definite plan for its regeneration. He had 
become, however, a much venerated as well as a picturesque 



314 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

figure; and he exerted a powerful and constructive in- 
fluence, not only directly, but indirectly through the 
preaching of his doctrines, in the main or in part, by the 
younger essayists and the chief Victorian poets and novel- 
ists, and in America by Emerson, with whom he maintained 
an almost lifelong friendship and correspondence. Car- 
lyle died in 1881. 

Carlyle was a strange combination of greatness and nar- 
rowness. Like Macaulay, he was exasperatingly blind 
and bigoted in regard to the things in which he had no 
personal interest, though the spheres of their respective 
enthusiasms and antipathies were altogether different. 
Carlyle viewed pleasure and merely esthetic art with the 
contempt of the Scottish Covenanting fanatics, refusing 
even to read poetry like that of Keats; and his insistence 
on moral meanings led him to equal intolerance of such 
story-tellers as Scott. In his hostility to the materialistic 
tendencies so often deduced from modern science he dis- 
missed Darwin's 'Origin of Species' with the exclamation 
that it showed up the capricious stupidity of mankind and 
that he never could read a page of it or would waste the 
least thought upon it. He mocked at the anti-slavery 
movement in both America and the English possessions, 
holding that the negroes were an inferior race probably 
better off while producing something under white masters 
than if left free in their own ignorance and sloth. Though 
his obstinacy was a part of his national temperament, 
and his physical and mental irritability in part a result 
of his ill-health, any candid estimate of his life cannot 
altogether overlook them. On the whole, however, there 
is no greater ethical, moral, and spiritual force in Eng- 
lish Literature than Carlyle, and so much of his thought 
has passed into the common possession of all thinking per- 
sons to-day that we are all often his debtors when we are 
least conscious of it. 

John Ruskin. Among the other great Victorian writers 
the most obvious disciple of Carlyle in his opposition to 
the materialism of modern life is John Ruskin. But Ruskin 
is much more than any man's disciple; and he also con- 
trasts strongly with Carlyle, first because a large part 
of his life was devoted to the study of Art — he is the 
single great art-critic in English Literature — and also be- 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 315 

cause he is one of the great preachers of that nineteenth 
century humanitarianism at which Carlyle was wont to 
sneer. 

Ruskin's parents were Scotch, but his father, a man of 
artistic tastes, was established as a wine-merchant in Lon- 
don and had amassed a fortune before the boy's birth in 
1819. The atmosphere of the household was sternly 
Puritan, and Ruskin was brought up under rigid discipline, 
especially by his mother, who gave him most of his early 
education. He read, wrote, and drew precociously; his 
knowledge of the Bible, in which his mother 's training was 
relentlessly thorough, of Scott, Pope, and Homer, dates 
from his fifth or sixth year. For many years during his 
boyhood he accompanied his parents on long annual driv- 
ing trips through Great Britain and parts of Europe, 
especially the Alps. By these experiences his inborn pas- 
sion for the beautiful and the grand in Nature and Art 
was early developed. During seven years he was at Ox- 
ford, where his mother lived with him and watched over 
him; until her death in his fifty-second year she always 
continued to treat him like a child, an attitude to which 
habit and affection led him to submit with a matter-of- 
course docility that his usual wilfulness and his later fame 
render at first sight astonishing. At Oxford, as throughout 
his life, he showed himself brilliant but not a close or care- 
ful student, and he was at that time theologically too 
rigid a Puritan to be interested in the Oxford Movement, 
then in its most intense stage. 

His career as a writer began immediately after he left 
the University. It falls naturally into two parts, the first 
of about twenty years, when he was concerned almost alto- 
gether with Art, chiefly Painting and Architecture; and 
the second somewhat longer, when he was intensely ab- 
sorbed in the problems of society and strenuously working 
as a social reformer. Prom the outset, however, he was 
actuated by an ardent didactic purpose; he wrote of Art 
in order to awake men's spiritual natures to a joyful de- 
light in the Beautiful and thus to lead them to God, its 
Author. 

The particular external direction of Ruskin's work in 
Art was given, as usual, more or less by accident. His own 
practice in water-color drawing led him as a mere youth 



316 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

to a devoted admiration for the landscape paintings of 
the contemporary artist J. M. W. Turner. Turner, a 
romantic revolutionist against the eighteenth century 
theory of the grand style, was then little appreciated ; and 
when Ruskin left the University he began, with character- 
istic enthusiasm, an article on 'Modern Painters,' designed 
to demonstrate Turner's superiority to ail possible rivals. 
Even the first part of this work expanded itself into a 
volume, published in 1843, when Ruskin was only twenty- 
four; and at intervals during the next seventeen years he 
issued four additional volumes, the result of prolonged 
study both of Nature and of almost all the great paint- 
ings in Europe. The completed book is a discursive 
treatise, the various volumes necessarily written from more 
or less different view-points, on many of the main aspects, 
general and technical, of all art, literary as well as pic- 
torial. For Ruskin held, and brilliantly demonstrated, that 
the underlying principles of all the Fine Arts are identical, 
and 'Modern Painters' contains some of the most famous 
and suggestive passages of general literary criticism ever 
written, for example those on The Pathetic Fallacy and 
The Grand Style. Still further, to Ruskin morality and 
religion are inseparable from Art, so that he deals search- 
ingly, if incidentally, with those subjects as well. Among 
his fundamental principles are the ideas that a beneficent 
God has created the world and its beauty directly for 
man's use and pleasure; that all true art and all true 
life are service of God and should be filled with a spirit of 
reverence; that art should reveal truth; and that really 
great and good art can spring only from noble natures 
and a sound national life. The style of the book is as no- 
table as the substance. It is eloquent with Ruskin 's en- 
thusiastic admiration for Beauty and with his magnificent 
romantic rhetoric (largely the result, according to his own 
testimony, of his mother's exacting drill in the Bible), 
which here and elsewhere make him one of the greatest of 
all masters of gorgeous description and of fervid exhorta- 
tion. The book displays fully, too, another of his chief 
traits, an intolerant dogmatism, violently contemptuous of 
any judgments but his own. On the religious side, espe- 
cially, Ruskin 's Protestantism is narrow and even bigoted, 
but it softens as the book proceeds (and decidedly more 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 317 

in his later years). "With all its faults, 'Modern Painters' 
is probably the greatest book ever written on Art and is an 
immense storehouse of noble material and suggestion. 

In the intervals of this work Ruskin published others 
less comprehensive, two of which are of the first im- 
portance. 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture' argues that 
great art, as the supreme expression of life, is the result 
of seven moral and religious principles, Sacrifice, Truth, 
Power, and the like. 'The Stones of Venice' is an im- 
passioned exposition of the beauty of Venetian Gothic 
architecture, and here as always Ruskin expresses his 
vehement preference for the Gothic art of the Middle Ages 
as contrasted with the less original and as it seems to him 
less sincere style of the Renaissance. 

' The publication of the last volume of 'Modern Painters' 
in 1860 roughly marks the end of Ruskin 's first period. 
Several influences had by this time begun to sadden him. 
More than ten years before, with his usual filial meekness, 
he had obeyed his parents in marrying a lady who proved 
uncongenial and who after a few years was divorced from 
him. Meanwhile acquaintance with Carlyle had combined 
with experience to convince him of the comparative inef- 
fectualness of mere art-criticism as a social and religious 
force. He had come to feel with increasing indignation 
that the modern industrial system, the materialistic political 
economy founded on it. and the whole modern organiza- 
tion of society reduce the mass of men to a state of intel- 
lectual, social, and religious squalor and blindness, and that 
while they continue in this condition it is of little use to 
talk to them about Beauty. He believed that some of the 
first steps in the necessary redemptive process must be 
the education of the poor and a return to what he con- 
ceived (certainly with much exaggeration) to have been 
the conditions of medieval labor, when each craftsman was 
not a mere machine but an intelligent and original artistic 
creator; but the underlying essential was to free industry 
from the spirit of selfish money-getting and permeate it 
with Christian sympathy and respect for man as man. 
The ugliness of modern life in its wretched city tenements 
and its hideous factories Ruskin would have utterly de- 
stroyed, substituting such a beautiful background (attrac- 
tive homes and surroundings) as would help to develop 



318 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

spiritual beauty. With his customary vigor Ruskin pro- 
ceeded henceforth to devote himself to the enunciation, 
and so far as possible the realization of these beliefs, first 
by delivering lectures and writing books. He was met, 
like all reformers, with a storm of protest, but most of his 
ideas gradually became the accepted principles of social 
theory. Among his works dealing with these subjects may 
be named 'Unto This Last,' 'Munera Pulveris' (The Re- 
wards of the Dust — an attack on materialistic political 
economy), and 'Fors Clavigera' (Fortune the Key-Bearer), 
the latter a series of letters to workingmen extending over 
many years. To 1865 belongs his most widely-read book, 
/^Sesame and Lilies,' three lectures on the spiritual mean- 
j ing of great literature in contrast to materialism, the glory j 
\ of womanhood, and the mysterious significance of life. 
From the death of his mother in 1871 Ruskin began to 
devote his large inherited fortune to 'St. George's Guild,' 
a series of industrial and social experiments in which with 
lavish generosity he attempted to put his theories into 
practical operation. All these experiments, as regards 
direct results, ended in failure, though their general in- 
fluence was great. Among other movements now every- 
where taken for granted 'social settlements' are a result 
of his efforts. 

All this activity had not caused Ruskin altogether to 
abandon the teaching of art to the members of the more 
well-to-do classes, and beginning in 1870 he held for three 
or four triennial terms the newly- established professor- 
ship of Art at Oxford and gave to it much hard labor. But 
this interest was now clearly secondary in his mind. 

Ruskin 's temper was always romantically high-strung, 
excitable, and irritable. His intense moral fervor, his 
multifarious activities, and his disappointments were also 
constant strains on his nervous force. In 1872, further, 
he was rejected in marriage by a young girl for whom he 
had formed a deep attachment and who on her death- 
bed, three years later, refused, with strange cruelty, to 
see him. In 1878 his health temporarily failed, and a few 
years later he retired to the home, 'Brantwood, ' at Conis- 
ton in the Lake Region, which he had bought on the death 
of his mother. Here his mind gradually gave way, but 
intermittently, so that he was still able to compose 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 319 

'Praeterita' (The Past), a delightful autobiography. He 
died in 1900. 

Ruskin, like Carlyle, was a strange compound of genius, 
nobility, and unreasonableness, but as time goes on his 
dogmatism and violence may well be more and more for- 
gotten, while his idealism, his penetrating interpretation 
of art and life, his fruitful work for a more tolerable social 
order, and his magnificent mastery of style and description 
assure him a permanent place in the history of English 
literature and of civilization. 

Matthew Arnold. Contemporary with Carlyle and 
Ruskin and fully worthy to rank with them stands still 
a third great preacher of social and spiritual regeneration, 
Matthew Arnold, whose personality and message, how- 
ever, were very different from theirs and who was also one 
of the chief Victorian poets. Arnold was born in 1822, the 
son — and this is decidedly significant — of the Dr. Thomas 
Arnold who later became the famous headmaster of Rugby 
School and did more than any other man of the century 
to elevate the tone of English school life. Matthew Arnold 
proceeded from Rugby to Oxford (Balliol College), where 
he took the prize for original poetry and distinguished him- 
self as a student. This was the period of the Oxford Move- 
ment, and Arnold was much impressed by Newman's fervor 
and charm, but was already too rationalistic in thought to 
sympathize with his views. After graduation Arnold 
taught Greek for a short time at Rugby and then became 
private secretary to Lord Lansdoune, who was minister 
of public instruction. Four years later, in 1851, Arnold 
was appointed an inspector of schools, a position which he 
held almost to the end of his life and in which he labored 
very hard and faithfully, partly at the expense of his 
creative work. His life was marked by few striking out- 
ward events. His marriage and home were happy. Up to 
1867 his literary production consisted chiefly of poetry, 
very carefully composed and very limited in amount, and 
for two five-year terms, from 1857 to 1867, he held the 
Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. At the expiration of 
his second term he did not seek for reappointment, be- 
cause he did not care to arouse the opposition of Glad- 
stone — then a power in public affairs — and stir up religious 
controversy. His retirement from this position virtually 



320 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

marks the very distinct change from the first to the second 
main period of his career. For with deliberate self-sacrifice 
he now turned from poetry to prose essays, because he felt 
that through the latter medium he could render what 
seemed to him a more necessary public service. With char- 
acteristic self-confidence, and obeying his inherited ten- 
dency to didacticism, he appointed himself, in effect, a 
critic of English national life, beliefs, and taste, and set 
out to instruct the public in matters of literature, social 
relations, politics and religion. In many essays, published 
separately or in periodicals, he persevered in this task 
until his death in 1888. 

As a poet Arnold is generally admitted to rank among 
the Victorians next after Tennyson and Browning. The 
criticism, partly true, that he was not designed by Nature 
to be a poet but made himself one by hard work rests on 
his intensely, and at the outset coldly, intellectual and 
moral temperament. He himself, in modified Puritan 
spirit, defined poetry as a criticism of life; his mind was 
philosophic; and in his own verse, inspired by Greek 
poetry, by Goethe and Wordsworth, he realized his defini- 
tion. In his work, therefore, delicate melody and sensuous 
beauty were at first much less conspicuous than a high 
moral sense, though after the first the elements of external 
beauty greatly developed, often to the finest effect. In 
form and spirit his poetry is one of the very best later 
reflections of that of Greece, dominated by thought; digni- 
fied, and polished with the utmost care. ' Sohrab and Rus- 
tum, ' his most ambitious and greatest single poem, is a 
very close and admirable imitation of 'The Iliad.' Yet, 
as the almost intolerable pathos of 'Sohrab and Rustum' 
witnesses, Arnold is not by any means deficient, any more 
than the Greek poets were, in emotion. He affords, in 
fact, a striking example of classical form and spirit united 
with the deep, self-conscious, meditative feeling of modern 
Romanticism. 

In substance Arnold's poetry is the expression of his 
long and tragic spiritual struggle. To him religion, under- 
stood as a reverent devotion to Divine things, was the most 
important element in life, and his love of pure truth was 
absolute ; but he held that modern knowledge had entirely 
disproved the whole dogmatic and doctrinal scheme of his- 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 321 

toric Christianity and that a new spiritual revelation was 
necessary. To his Romantic nature, however, mere knowl- 
edge and mere modern science, which their followers were 
so confidently exalting, appeared by no means adequate to 
the purpose; rather they seemed to him largely futile, be- 
cause they did not stimulate the emotions and so minister to 
the spiritual life. Further, the restless stirrings of his age, 
beginning to arouse itself from the social lethargy of cen- 
turies, appeared to him pitifully unintelligent and de- 
void of results. He found all modern life, as he says in 
'The Scholar-Gypsy,' a 'strange disease,' in which men 
hurry wildly about in a mad activity which they mistake 
for achievement. In Romantic melancholy he looked wist- 
fully back by contrast to periods when 'life was fresh and 
young' and could express itself vigorously and with no 
torturing introspection. The exaggerated pessimism in this 
part of his outcry is explained by his own statement, that 
he lived in a transition time, when the old faith was (as he 
held) dead, and the new one (partly realized in our own 
generation) as yet 'powerless to be born.' Arnold's poetry, 
therefore, is to be viewed as largely the expression, mo- 
notonous but often poignantly beautiful, of a temporary 
mood of questioning protest. But if his conclusion is not 
positive, it is at least not weakly despairing. Each man, 
he insists, should diligently preserve and guard in in- 
tellectual and moral integrity the fortress of his own 
soul, into which, when necessary, he can retire in serene 
and stoical resignation, determined to endure and to 'see 
life steadily and see it whole.' Unless the man himself 
proves traitor, the littlenesses of life are powerless to con- 
quer him. In fact, the invincible courage of the thoroughly 
disciplined spirit in the midst of doubt and external dis- 
couragement has never been more nobly expressed than by 
Arnold in such poems as 'Palladium' and (from a different 
point of view) 'The Last Word.' 

There is a striking contrast (largely expressing an actual 
change of spirit and point of view) between the manner 
of Arnold's poetry and that of his prose. In the latter 
he entirely abandons the querulous note and assumes in- 
stead a tone of easy assurance, jaunty and delightfully 
satirical. Increasing maturity had taught him that merely 
to sit regarding the past was useless and that he himself 



322 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

had a definite doctrine, worthy of being preached with 
all aggressiveness. We have already said that his essays 
fall into fonr classes, literary, social, religions, and po- 
litical, though they cannot always be sharply distinguished. 
As a literary critic he is uneven, and, as elsewhere, some- 
times superficial, but his fine appreciation and generally 
clear vision make him refreshingly stimulating. His point 
of view is unusually broad, his chief general purpose be- 
ing to free English taste from its insularity, to give it sym- 
pathetic acquaintance with the peculiar excellences of other 
literatures. Some of his essays, like those on 'The Func- 
tion of Criticism at the Present Time, ' ' Wordsworth, ' and 
'Byron,' are among the best in English, while his 'Essays 
on Translating Homer' present the most famous existing 
interpretation of the spirit and style of the great Greek 
epics. 

In his social essays, of which the most important form 
the volume entitled 'Culture and Anarchy,' he continues 
in his own way the attacks of Carlyle and Ruskin. Con- 
temporary English life seems to him a moral chaos of 
physical misery and of the selfish, unenlightened, violent 
expression of untrained wills. He too looks with pitying 
contempt on the material achievements of science and the 
Liberal party as being mere ' machinery, ' means to an end, 
which men mistakenly worship as though it possessed a 
real value in itself. He divides English society into three 
classes: 1. The Aristocracy, whom he nick-names 'The 
Barbarians,' because, like the Germanic tribes who over- 
threw the Roman Empire, they vigorously assert their 
own privileges and live in the external life rather than in 
the life of the spirit. 2. The Middle Class, which includes 
the bulk of the nation. For them he borrows from Ger- 
man criticism the name ' Philistines, ' enemies of the chosen 
people, and he finds their prevailing traits to be intel- 
lectual and spiritual narrowness and a fatal and superficial 
satisfaction with mere activity and material prosperity. 
3. 'The Populace,' the 'vast raw and half-developed 
residuum.' For them Arnold had sincere theoretical sym- 
pathy (though his temperament made it impossible for him 
to enter into the same sort of personal sympathy with them 
as did Ruskin) ; but their whole environment and concep- 
tion of life seemed to him hideous. With his usual un- 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 323 

complimentary frankness Arnold summarily described the 
three groups as 'a materialized upper class, a vulgarized 
middle class, and a brutalized lower class.' 

For the cure of these evils Arnold's proposed remedy 
was Culture, which he defined as a knowledge of the best 
that has been thought and done in the world and a desire to 
make the best ideas prevail. Evidently this Culture is not 
a mere knowledge of books, unrelated to the rest of life. It 
has indeed for its basis a very wide range of knowledge, 
acquired by intellectual processes, but this knowledge alone 
Arnold readily admitted to be ' machinery. ' The real pur- 
pose and main part of Culture is the training, broadening, 
and refining of the whole spirit, including the emotions as 
well as the intellect, into sympathy with all the highest 
ideals, and therefore into inward peace and satisfaction. 
Thus Culture is not indolently selfish, but is forever exert- 
ing itself to 'make the best ideas' — which Arnold also de- 
fined as 'reason and the will of God' — 'prevail.' 

Arnold felt strongly that a main obstacle to Culture 
was religious narrowness. He held that the English people 
had been too much occupied with the 'Hebraic' ideal of the 
Old Testament, the interest in morality or right conduct, 
and though he agreed that this properly makes three quar- 
ters of life, he insisted that it should be joined with the 
Hellenic (Greek) ideal of a perfectly rounded nature. He 
found the essence of Hellenism expressed in a phrase which 
he took from Swift, 'Sweetness and Light,' interpreting 
Sweetness to mean the love of Beauty, material and spir- 
itual, and Light, unbiased intelligence; and he urged that 
these forces be allowed to have the freest play. He 
vigorously attacked the Dissenting denominations, because 
he believed them to be a conspicuous embodiment of Philis- 
tine lack of Sweetness and Light, with an unlovely in- 
sistence on unimportant external details and a fatal blind- 
ness to the meaning of real beauty and real spirituality. 
Though he himself was without a theological creed, he 
was, and held that every Englishman should be, a devoted 
adherent of the English Church, as a beautiful, dignified, 
and national expression of essential religion, and therefore 
a very important influence for Culture. 

Toward democracy Arnold took, not Carlyle's attitude 
of definite opposition, but one of questioning scrutiny. 



324 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

He found that one actual tendency of modern democracy 
was to ' let people do as they liked, ' which, given the crude 
violence of the Populace, naturally resulted in lawlessness 
and therefore threatened anarchy. Culture, on the other 
hand, includes the strict discipline of the will and the 
sacrifice of one's own impulses for the good of all, which 
means respect for Law and devotion to the State. Ex- 
isting democracy, therefore, he attacked with unsparing 
irony, but he did not condemn its principle. One critic 
has said that 'his ideal of a State can best be described as 
an Educated Democracy, working by Collectivism in Gov- 
ernment, Religion and Social Order.' But in his own 
writings he scarcely gives expression to so definite a con- 
ception. 

Arnold's doctrine, of course, was not perfectly compre- 
hensive nor free from prejudices ; but none could be essen- 
tially more useful for his generation or ours. We may 
readily grant that it is, in one sense or another, a doctrine 
for chosen spirits, but if history makes anything clear it 
is that chosen spirits are the necessary instruments of all 
progress and therefore the chief hope of society. 

The differences between Arnold's teaching and that of his 
two great contemporaries are probably now clear. All 
three are occupied with the pressing necessity of regenerat- 
ing society. Carlyle would accomplish this end by means 
of great individual characters inspired by confidence in 
the spiritual life and dominating their times by moral 
strength ; Ruskin would accomplish it by humanizing social 
conditions and spiritualizing and refining all men 's natures 
through devotion to the principles of moral Right and 
esthetic Beauty; Arnold would leaven the crude mass of 
society, so far as possible, by permeating it with all the 
myriad influences of spiritual, moral, and esthetic culture. 
All three, of course, like every enlightened reformer, are 
aiming at ideal conditions which can be actually realized 
only in the distant future. 

Arnold's style is one of the most charming features of 
his work. Clear, direct, and elegant, it reflects most at- 
tractively his own high breeding; but it is also eminently 
forceful, and marked by very skilful emphasis and reitera- 
tion. One of his favorite devices is a pretense of great 
humility, which is only a shelter from which he shoots forth 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 325 

incessant and pitiless volleys of ironical raillery, light 
and innocent in appearance, but irresistible in aim and 
penetrating power. He has none of the gorgeousness of 
Ruskin or the titanic strength of Carlyle, but he can 
be finely eloquent, and he is certainly one of the masters 
of polished effectiveness. 

Alfred Tennyson. In poetry, apart from the drama, the 
Victorian period is the greatest in English literature. Its 
most representative, though not its greatest, poet is Alfred 
Tennyson. Tennyson, the fourth of a large family of 
children, was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809. 
That year, as it happened, is distinguished by the birth of 
a large number of eminent men, among them Gladstone, 
Darwin, and Lincoln. Tennyson's father was a clergyman, 
holding his appointments from a member of the landed 
gentry; his mother was peculiarly gentle and benevolent. 
Prom childhood the poet, though physically strong, was 
moody and given to solitary dreaming; from early child- 
hood also he composed poetry, and when he was seventeen 
he and one of his elder brothers brought out a volume of 
verse, immature, but of distinct poetic feeling and promise. 
The next year they entered Trinity College, Cambridge, 
where Tennyson, too reserved for public prominence, never- 
theless developed greatly through association with a gifted 
group of students. Called home by the fatal illness of 
his father shortly before his four years were completed, 
he decided, as Milton had done, and as Browning was 
even then doing, to devote himself to his art; but, like 
Milton, he equipped himself, now and throughout his life, 
by hard and systematic study of many of the chief branches 
of knowledge, including the sciences. His next twenty 
years were filled with difficulty and sorrow. Two volumes 
of poems which he published in 1830 and 1832 were greeted 
by the critics with their usual harshness, which deeply 
wounded his sensitive spirit and checked his further pub- 
lication for ten years ; though the second of these volumes 
contains some pieces which, in their later, revised, form, 
are among his chief lyric triumphs. In 1833 his warm 
friend Arthur Hallam, a young man of extraordinary 
promise, who was engaged, moreover, to one of Tennyson's 
sisters, died suddenly without warning. Tennyson's grief, 
at first overwhelming, was long a main factor in his life 



326 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and during many years found slow artistic expression in 
'In Memoriam' and other poems. A few years later came 
another deep sorrow. Tennyson formed an engagement 
of marriage with Miss Emily Sellwood, but his lack of 
worldly prospects led her relatives to cancel it. 

Tennyson now spent much of his time in London, on 
terms of friendship with many literary men, including 
Carlyle, who almost made an exception in his favor from his 
general fanatical contempt for poetry. In 1842 Tennyson 
published two volumes of poems, including the earlier 
ones revised; he here won an undoubted popular success 
and was accepted by the best judges as the chief living 
productive English poet. Disaster followed in the shape of 
an unfortunate financial venture which for a time reduced 
his family to serious straits and drove him with shattered 
nerves to a sanitarium. Soon, however, he received from 
the government as a recognition of his poetic achievement a 
permanent annual pension of two hundred pounds, and in 
1847 he published the strange but delightful 'Princess.' 
The year 1850 marked the decisive turning point of his 
career. He was enabled to renew his engagement and be 
married; the publication of 'In Memoriam' established 
him permanently in a position of such popularity as few 
living poets have ever enjoyed ; and on the death of Words- 
worth he was appointed Poet Laureate. 

The prosperity of the remaining half of his life was a 
full recompense for his earlier struggles, though it is 
marked by few notable external events. Always a lover 
of the sea, he soon took up his residence in the Isle of 
Wight. His production of poetry was steady, and its 
variety great. The largest of all his single achievements 
was the famous series of 'Idylls of the King,' which 
formed a part of his occupation for many years. In much 
of his later work there is a marked change from his earlier 
elaborate decorativeness to a style of vigorous strength. 
At the age of sixty-five, fearful that he had not yet done 
enough to insure his fame, he gave a remarkable demon- 
stration of poetic vitality by striking out into the to him 
new field of poetic drama. His important works here are 
the three tragedies in which he aimed to complete the 
series of Shakspere 's chronicle-history plays ; but he lacked 
the power of dramatic action, and the result is rather three 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 327 

fine poems than successful plays. In 1883, after having 
twice refused a baronetcy, he, to the regret of his more 
democratic friends, accepted a peerage (barony). Tenny- 
son disliked external show, but he was always intensely 
loyal to the institutions of England, he felt that literature 
was being honored in his person, and he was willing to 
secure a position of honor for his son, who had long ren- 
dered him devoted service. He died quietly in 1892, at the 
age of eighty-three, and was buried in Westminster Abbey 
beside Browning, who had found a resting-place there three 
years earlier. His personal character, despite some youth- 
ful morbidness, was unusually delightful, marked by cour- 
age, honesty, sympathy, and straightforward manliness. He 
had a fine voice and took undisguised pleasure in reading 
his poems aloud. The chief traits of his poetry in form 
and substance may be suggested in a brief summary. 

1. Most characteristic, perhaps, is his exquisite artistry 
(in which he learned much from Keats). His apprecia- 
tion for sensuous beauty, especially color, is acute; his 
command of poetic phraseology is unsurpassed ; he suggests 
shades of feeling and elusive aspiration with marvelously 
subtile power; his descriptions are magnificently beauti- 
ful, often with much detail; and his melody is often the 
perfection of sweetness. Add the truth and tenderness of 
his emotion, and it results that he is one of the finest and 
most moving of lyric poets. Nor is all this beauty vague 
and unsubstantial. Not only was he the most careful of 
English poets, revising his works with almost unprece- 
dented pains, but his scientific habit of mind insists on the 
greatest accuracy; in his allusions to Nature he often 
introduces scientific facts in a way thitherto unparalleled, 
and sometimes even only doubtfully poetic. The influence 
of the classic literatures on his style and expression was 
great; no poet combines more harmoniously classic per- 
fection and romantic feeling. 

2. The variety of his poetic forms is probably greater 
than that of any other English poet. In summary cata- 
logue may be named: lyrics, both delicate and stirring; 
ballads ; romantic dreams and fancies ; descriptive poems ; 
sentimental reveries and idyls ; long narratives, in which he 
displays perfect narrative skill ; delightfully realistic char- 
acter-sketches, some of them in dialect ; dramas ; and medi- 



328 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tative poems, long: and short, on religions, ethical, and 
social questions. In almost all these forms he has pro- 
duced numerous masterpieces. 

3. His chief deficiency is in the dramatic quality. No 
One can present more finely than he moods (often carefully 
set in a harmoniously appropriate background of external 
nature) or characters in stationary position; and there is 
splendid spirit in his narrative passages of vigorous action. 
Nevertheless his genius and the atmosphere of his poems 
are generally dreamy, romantic, and aloof from actual life. 
A brilliant critic * has caustically observed that he ' with- 
draws from the turmoil of the real universe into the fortress 
of his own mind, and beats the enemy in toy battles with 
toy soldiers.' He never succeeded in presenting to the 
satisfaction of most good critics a vigorous man in vigorous 
action. 

4. The ideas of his poetry are noble and on the whole 
clear. He was an independent thinker, though- not an 
innovator, a conservative liberal, and was so widely popu- 
lar because he expressed in frank but reverent fashion the 
moderately advanced convictions of his time. His social 
ideals, in which he is intensely interested, are those of 
Victorian humanitarianism. He hopes ardently for a 
steady amelioration of the condition of the masses, proceed- 
ing toward a time when all men shall have real oppor- 
tunity for full development; and freedom is one of his 
chief watchwords. But with typical English conservatism 
he believes that progress must be gradual, and that it 
should be controlled by order, loyalty, and reverence. Like 
a true Englishman, also, he is sure that the institutions of 
England are the best in the world, so that he is a strong 
supporter of the monarchy and the hereditary aristocracy. 
In religion, his inherited belief, rooted in his deepest 
fibers, early found itself confronted by the discoveries of 
modern science, which at first seemed to him to proclaim 
that the universe is much what it seemed to the young 
Carlyle, a remorseless monster, 'red in tooth and claw,' 
scarcely thinkable as the work of a Christian God who 
cares for man. Tennyson was too sincere to evade the 
issue, and after years of inner struggle he arrived at a 

* Professor Lewis E. Gates in a notable essay, ' Studies and Ap- 
preciations,' p. 71. 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 329 

positive faith in the central principles of Christianity, 
broadly interpreted, though it was avowedly a faith based 
on instinct and emotional need rather than on unassailable 
reasoning. His somewhat timid disposition, moreover, 
never allowed him to enunciate his conclusions with 
anything like the buoyant aggressiveness of his contem- 
porary, Robert Browning. How greatly science had in- 
fluenced his point of view appears in the conception which 
is central in his later poetry, namely that the forces of the 
universe are governed by unchanging Law, through which 
God works. The best final expression of his spirit is the 
lyric ' Crossing the Bar, ' which every one knows and which 
at his own request is printed last in all editions of his 
works. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning". 
Robert Browning, Tennyson's chief poetic contemporary, 
stands in striking artistic contrast to Tennyson — a con- 
trast which perhaps serves to enhance the reputation of 
both. Browning's life, if not his poetry, must naturally 
be considered in connection with that of Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning, with whom he was united in what appears the 
most ideal marriage of two important writers in the history 
of literature. 

Elizabeth Barrett, the daughter of a country gentleman 
of Herefordshire (the region of the Malvern Hills and of 
'Piers Plowman'), was born in 1806. She was naturally 
both healthy and intellectually precocious; the writing of 
verse and outdoor life divided all her early, life, and at 
seventeen she published a volume of immature poems. 
At fifteen, however, her health was impaired by an acci- 
dent which happened as she was saddling her pony, and 
at thirty, after a removal of the family to London, it 
completely failed. Prom that time on for ten years she 
was an invalid, confined often to her bed and generally 
to her chamber, sometimes apparently at the point of death. 
Nevertheless she kept on with persistent courage and en- 
ergy at her study and writing. The appearance of her 
poems in two volumes in 1844 gave her a place among the 
chief living poets and led to her acquaintance with Brown- 
ing. 

'Browning was born in a London suburb in 1812 (the 
same year with Dickens), of very mixed ancestry, which 



330 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

may partly explain the very diverse traits in his nature 
and poetry. His father, a man of artistic and cultured 
tastes, held a subordinate though honorable position in the 
Bank of England. The son inherited a strong instinct for 
all the fine arts, and though he composed verses before he 
could write, seemed for years more likely to become a musi- 
cian than a poet. His formal schooling was irregular, but 
he early began to acquire from his father's large and 
strangely-assorted library the vast fund of information 
which astonishes the reader of his poetry, and he too lived 
a healthy out-of-door life. His parents being Dissenters, 
the universities were not open to him, and when he was 
seventeen his father somewhat reluctantly consented to his 
own unhesitating choice of poetry as a profession. For 
seventeen years more he continued in his father's home, 
living a normal life among his friends, writing continu- 
ously, and gradually acquiring a reputation among some 
good critics, but making very little impression on the pub- 
lic. Some of his best short poems date from these years, 
such as 'My Last Duchess' and 'The Bishop Orders His 
Tomb'; but his chief effort went into a series of seven or 
eight poetic dramas, of which 'Pippa Passes' is best known 
and least dramatic. They are noble poetry, but display in 
marked degree the psychological subtilety which in part 
of his poetry demands unusually close attention from the 
reader. 

In one of the pieces in her volumes of 1844 Elizabeth 
Barrett mentioned Browning, among other poets, with 
generous praise. This led to a correspondence between the 
two, and soon to a courtship, in which Browning's earnest- 
ness finally overcame Miss Barrett's scrupulous hesitation 
to lay upon him (as she felt) the burden of her invalidism. 
Indeed her invalidism at last helped to turn the scales in 
Browning's favor, for the physicians had declared that 
Miss Barrett's life depended on removal to a warmer 
climate, but to this her father, a well-intentioned but 
strangely selfish man, absolutely refused to consent. The 
record of the courtship is given in Mrs. Browning's 'Son- 
nets from the Portuguese' (a whimsical title, suggested by 
Mrs. Browning's childhood nickname, 'The Little Portu- 
guese'), which is one of the finest of English sonnet-se- 
quences. The marriage, necessarily clandestine, took place 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 331 

in 1816; Mrs. Browning's father thenceforth treated her 
as one dead, but the removal from her morbid surroundings 
largely restored her health for the remaining fifteen years 
of her life. During these fifteen years the two poets 
resided chiefly in various cities of Italy, with a nominal 
home in Florence, and Mrs. Browning had an inherited in- 
come which sufficed for their support until their poetry 
became profitable. Their chief works during this period 
were Mrs. Browning's 'Aurora Leigh' (1856), a long 
'poetic novel' in blank verse dealing with the relative 
claims of Art and Social Service and with woman's place 
in the world; and Browning's most important single pub- 
lication, his two volumes of 'Men and AYomen' (1855), 
containing fifty poems, many of them among his very 
best. 

Mrs. Browning was passionately interested in the Italian 
struggle for independence against Austrian tyranny, and 
her sudden death in 1861 seems to have been hastened by 
that of the Italian statesman Cavour. Browning, at first 
inconsolable, soon returned with his son to London, where 
he again made his home, for the rest of his life. Hence- 
forth he published much poetry, for the most part long 
pieces of subtile psychological and spiritual analysis. In 
1868-9 he brought out his characteristic masterpiece, 'The 
Ring and the Book,' a huge psychological epic, which 
proved the tardy turning point in his reputation. People 
might not understand the poem, but they could not dis- 
regard it, the author became famous, almost popular, and 
a Browning cult arose, marked by the spread of Browning 
societies in both England and America. Browning en- 
joyed his success for twenty years and died quietly in 1889 
at the home of his son in Venice. 

Browning earnestly reciprocated his wife 's loyal devotion 
and seemed really to believe, as he often insisted, that her 
poetry was of a higher order than his own. Her achieve- 
ment, indeed, was generally overestimated, in her own day 
and later, but it is now recognized that she is scarcely a 
really great artist. Her intense emotion, her fine Christian 
idealism, and her very wide reading give her real power: 
her womanly tenderness is admirable; and the breadth 
of her interests and sometimes the clearness of her judg- 
ment are notable; but her secluded life of ill-health ren- 



332 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

dered her often sentimental, high-strung, and even hys- 
terical. She has in her the impulses and material of great 
poetry, but circumstances and her temperament combined 
to deny her the patient self-discipline necessary for the 
best results. She writes vehemently to assert the often- 
neglected rights of women and children or to denounce 
negro slavery and all oppression; and sometimes, as when 
in 'The Cry of the Children' she revealed the hideousness 
of child-labor in the factories, she is genuine and irresist- 
ible; but more frequently she produces highly romantic or 
mystical imaginary narrations (often in medieval settings). 
She not seldom mistakes enthusiasm or indignation for ar- 
tistic inspiration, and she is repeatedly and inexcusably 
careless in meter and rime. Perhaps her most satisfactory 
poems, aside from those above mentioned, are 'The Vision 
of Poets' and 'The Rime of the Duchess May.' 

In considering the poetry of Robert Browning the in- 
evitable first general point is the nearly complete contrast 
with Tennyson. For the melody and exquisite beauty of 
phrase and description which make so large a part of Ten- 
nyson's charm, Browning cares very little; his chief merits 
as an artist lie mostly where Tennyson is least strong; and 
he is a much more independent and original thinker than 
Tennyson. This will become more evident in a survey of 
his main characteristics. 

1. Browning is the most thoroughly vigorous and dra- 
matic of all great poets who employ other forms than the 
actual drama. Of his hundreds of poems the great ma- 
jority set before the reader a glimpse of actual life and 
human personalities — an action, a situation, characters, or 
a character — in the clearest and most vivid possible way. 
Sometimes the poem is a ringing narration of a fine exploit, 
like 'How They Brought the Good News'; sometimes it is 
quieter and more reflective. Whatever the style, however, 
in the great majority of cases Browning employs the form 
which without having actually invented it he developed 
into an instrument of thitherto unsuspected power, namely 
the dramatic monolog in which a character discusses his sit- 
uation or life or some central part or incident of it, under 
circumstances which reveal with wonderful completeness 
its significance and his own essential character. To portray 
and interpret life in this way, to give his readers a sudden 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 333 

vivid understanding of its main forces and conditions in 
representative moments, may be called the first obvious 
purpose, or perhaps rather instinct, of Browning and his 
poetry. The dramatic economy of space which he generally 
attains in his monologs is marvelous. In 'My Last Duchess' 
sixty lines suffice to etch into our memories with incredible 
completeness and clearness two striking characters, an in- 
teresting situation, and the whole of a life's tragedy. 

2. Despite his power over external details it is in the 
human characters, as the really significant and permanent 
elements of life, that Browning is chiefly interested; in- 
deed he once declared directly that the only thing that 
seemed to him worth while was the study of souls. The 
number and range of characters that he has portrayed are 
unprecedented, and so are the keenness, intenseness, and 
subtilety of the analysis. Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo 
Lippi, Cleon, Karshish, Balaustion, and many scores of 
others, make of his poems a great gallery of portraits un- 
surpassed in interest by those of any author whatever 
except Shakspere. It is little qualification of his achieve- 
ment to add that all his persons are somewhat colored by 
his own personality and point of view, or that in his later 
poetry he often splits hairs very ingeniously in his effort 
to understand and present sympathetically the motives of 
all characters, even the worst. These are merely some of 
the secondary aspects of his peculiar genius. Browning's 
favorite heroes and heroines, it should be added, are men 
and women much like himself, of strong will and decisive 
power of action, able to take the lead vigorously and un- 
conventionally and to play controlling parts in the drama 
of life. 

3. The frequent comparative difficulty of Browning's 
poetry arises in large part first from the subtilety of his 
thought and second from the obscurity of his subject- 
matter and his fondness for out-of-the-way characters. It 
is increased by his disregard of the difference between his 
own extraordinary mental power and agility on the one 
hand and on the other the capacity of the average person, 
a disregard which leads him to take much for granted that 
most readers are obliged to study out with no small amount 
of labor. Moreover Browning was hasty in composition, 
corrected his work little if at all, and was downright 



334 A HISTOEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

careless in such- details as sentence structure. But the 
difficulty arising from these various eccentricities occurs 
chiefly in his longer poems, and often serves mainly as a 
mental stimulus. Equally striking, perhaps, is his fre- 
quent grotesqueness in choice of subject and in treatment, 
which seems to result chiefly from his wish to portray the 
world as it actually is, keeping in close touch with genuine 
everyday reality; partly also from his instinct to break 
away from placid and fiberless conventionality. 

4. Browning is decidedly one of those who hold the 
poet to be a teacher, and much, indeed most, of his poetry 
is occupied rather directly with the questions of religion 
and the deeper meanings of life. Taken all together, that 
is, his poetry constitutes a very extended statement of his 
philosophy of life. The foundation of his whole theory 
is a confident and aggressive optimism. He believes, partly 
on the basis of intellectual reasoning, but mainly on what 
seems to him the convincing testimony of instinct, that the 
universe is controlled by a loving God, who has made life 
primarily a thing of happiness for man. Man should accept 
life with gratitude and enjoy to the full all its possibilities. 
Evil exists only to demonstrate the value of Good and to 
develop character, which can be produced only by hard and 
sincere struggle. Unlike Tennyson, therefore, Browning 
has full confidence in present reality — he believes that life 
on earth is predominantly good. Nevertheless earthly life 
is evidently incomplete in itself, and the central law of 
existence is Progress, which gives assurance of a future 
life where man may develop the spiritual nature which on 
earth seems to have its beginning and distinguishes man 
from the brutes. This future life, however, is probably 
not one but many, a long succession of lives, the earlier ones 
not so very different, perhaps, from the present one on 
earth; and even the worst souls, commencing the next life, 
perhaps, as a result of their failure here, at a spiritual 
stage lower than the present one, must ultimately pass 
through all stages of the spiritual process, and come to 
stand with all the others near the perfection of God him- 
self. This whole theory, which, because later thought has 
largely adopted it from Browning, seems much less original 
to-day than when he first propounded it, is stated and re- 
iterated in his poems with a dynamic idealizing power 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 335 

which, whether or not one assents to it in- details, renders 
it magnificently stimulating. It is rather fully expressed 
as a whole in two of Browning's best known and finest 
poems, ' Rabbi ben Ezra, ' and ' Abt Vogler. ' Some critics, 
it should be added, however, feel that Browning is too often 
and too insistently a teacher in his poetry and that his art 
would have gained if he had introduced his philosophy 
much more incidentally. 

5. In his social theory Browning differs not only from 
Tennyson but from the prevailing thought of his age, differs 
in that his emphasis is individualistic. Like all the other 
Victorians he dwells on the importance of individual devo- 
tion to the service of others, but he believes that the chief 
results of such effort must be in the development of the 
individual's character, not greatly in the actual better- 
ment of the world. The world, indeed, as it appears to 
him, is a v place of probation and we cannot expect ever to 
make it over very radically; the important thing is that 
the individual soul shall use it to help him on his ' lone way ' 
to heaven. Browning, accordingly, takes almost no interest 
in the specific social and political questions of his day, a fact 
which certainly will not operate against the permanence 
of his fame. More detrimental, no doubt, aside from the 
actual faults which we have mentioned, will be his rather 
extravagant Romanticism — the vehemence of his passion 
and his insistence on the supreme value of emotion. With 
these characteristics classically minded critics have always 
been highly impatient, and they will no doubt prevent him 
from ultimately taking a place beside Shakspere and the 
serene Milton ; but they will not seriously interfere, we 
may be certain, with his recognition as one of the very 
great English poets. 

Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Many of 
the secondary Victorian poets must here be passed by. but- 
several of them are too important to be dismissed without 
at least brief notice. The middle of the century is marked 
by a new Romantic impulse, the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, 
which begins with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rosetti was born 
in London in 1828. His father was an Italian, a liberal 
refugee from the outrageous, government of Naples, and 
his mother was also half Italian. The household, though 
poor, was a center for other Italian exiles, but this early 



336 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and tempestuous political atmosphere created in the poet, 
by reaction, a lifelong aversion for politics. His desultory 
education was mostly in the lines of painting and the 
Italian and English poets. His own practice in poetry be- 
gan as early as is usual with poets, and before he was 
nineteen, by a special inspiration, he wrote his best and 
most famous poem, 'The Blessed Damosel.' In the school 
of the Royal Academy of Painting, in 1848, he met "William 
Holman Hunt and John E. Millais, and the three formed 
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, in which Rossetti, whose 
disposition throughout his life was extremely self-assertive, 
or even domineering, took the lead. The purpose of the 
Brotherhood was to restore to painting and literature the 
qualities which the three enthusiasts found in the fif- 
teenth century Italian painters, those who just preceded 
Raphael. Rossetti and his friends did not decry the noble 
idealism of Raphael himself, but they felt that in trying 
to follow his grand style the art of their own time had 
become too abstract and conventional. They wished to 
renew emphasis on serious emotion, imagination, indi- 
viduality, and fidelity to truth ; and in doing so they gave 
special attention to elaboration of details in a fashion dis- 
tinctly reminiscent of medievalism. Their work had much, 
also, of medieval mysticism and symbolism. Besides paint- 
ing pictures they published a very short-lived periodical, 
'The Germ,' containing both literary material and draw- 
ings. Ruskin, now arriving at fame and influence, wrote 
vigorously in their favor, and though the Brotherhood did 
not last long as an organization, it has exerted a great in- 
fluence on subsequent painting. 

Rossetti 's impulses were generous, but his habits were 
eccentric and selfish, and his life unfortunate. His engage- 
ment with Miss Eleanor Siddal, a milliner's apprentice 
(whose face appears in many of his pictures), was pro- 
longed by his lack of means for nine years; further, he 
was an agnostic, while she held a simple religious faith, 
and she was carrying on a losing struggle with tuberculosis. 
Sixteen months after their marriage she died, and on a 
morbid impulse of remorse for inconsiderateness in his 
treatment of her Rossetti buried his poems, still unpub- 
lished, in her coffin. After some years, however, he was 
persuaded to disinter and publish them. Meanwhile he had 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 337 

formed friendships with the slightly younger artists Wil- 
liam Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and they estab- 
lished a company for the manufacture of furniture and 
other articles, to be made beautiful as well as useful, and 
thus to aid in spreading the esthetic sense among the Eng- 
lish people. After some years Rossetti and Burne-Jones 
withdrew from the enterprise, leaving it to Morris. Ros- 
setti continued all his life to produce both poetry and 
paintings. His pictures are among the best and most 
gorgeous products of recent romantic art — 'Dante's 
Dream, ' ' Beata Beatrix, ' ' The Blessed Damosel, ' and many 
others. During his later years he earned a large income, 
and he lived in a large house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea 
(near Carlyle), where for a while, as long as his irregular 
habits permitted, the novelist George Meredith and the 
poet Swinburne were also inmates. He gradually grew 
more morbid, and became a rather pitiful victim of in- 
somnia, the drug chloral, and spiritualistic delusions about 
his wife. He died in 1882. 

Rossetti 's poetry is absolutely unlike that of any other 
English poet, and the difference is clearly due in large part 
to his Italian race and his painter's instinct. He has, in 
the didactic sense, absolutely no religious, moral, or social 
interests; he is an artist almost purely for art's sake, writ- 
ing to give beautiful embodiment to moods, experiences, 
and striking moments. If it is true of Tennyson, how- 
ever, that he stands aloof from actual life, this is far 
truer of Rossetti. His world is a vague and languid region 
of enchantment, full of whispering winds, indistinct forms 
of personified abstractions, and the murmur of hidden 
streams; its landscape sometimes bright, sometimes shad- 
owy, but always delicate, exquisitely arranged for lux- 
urious decorative effect. In his ballad-romances, to be 
sure, such as 'The King's Tragedy,' there is much dra- 
matic vigor; yet there is still more of medieval weirdness. 
Rossetti, like Dante, has much of spiritual mysticism, and 
his interest centers in the inner rather than the outer life ; 
but his method, that of a painter and a southern Italian, is 
always highly sensuous. His melody is superb and de- 
pends partly on a highly Latinized vocabulary, archaic pro- 
nunciations, and a delicate genius in sound-modulation, the 
effect being heightened also by frequent alliteration and 



338 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

masterly use of refrains. 'Sister Helen,' obviously in- 
fluenced by the popular ballad 'Edward, Edward,' derives 
much of its tremendous tragic power from the refrain, 
and in the use of this device is perhaps the most effective 
poem in the world. Rossetti is especially facile also with 
the sonnet. His sonnet sequence, 'The House of Life,' 
one of the most notable in English, exalts earthly Love as 
the central force in the world and in rather fragmentary 
fashion traces the tragic influence of Change in both life 
and love. 

William Morris. William Morris, a man of remarkable 
versatility and tremendous energy, which expressed them- 
selves in poetry and many other ways, was the son of a 
prosperous banker, and was born in London in 1834. At 
Oxford in 1853-55 he became interested in medieval life 
and art, was stimulated by the poetry of Mrs. Browning 
and Tennyson, became a friend of Burne-Jones, wrote verse 
and prose, and was a member of a group called 'The 
Brotherhood,' while a little later published for a year a 
monthly magazine not unlike ' The Germ. ' He apprenticed 
himself to an architect, but at the same time also practised 
several decorative arts, such as woodcarving, illuminating 
manuscripts, and designing furniture, stained glass and 
embroidery. Together with Burne-Jones, moreover, he 
became an enthusiastic pupil of Rossetti in painting. His 
first volume of verse, 'The Defence of Guinevere and 
Other Poems,' put forth in 1858, shows the influence of 
Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism, but it mainly gives vivid 
presentation to the spirit of fourteenth-century French 
chivalry. In 1861 came the foundation of the decorative- 
art firm of Morris and Co. (above, p. 337), which after 
some years grew into a large business, continued to be 
Morris' main occupation to the end of his life, and has 
exercised a great influence, both in England and else- 
where, on the beautifying of the surroundings of do- 
mestic life. 

Meanwhile Morris had turned to the writing of long 
narrative poems, which he composed with remarkable 
fluency. The most important is the series of versions of 
Greek and Norse myths and legends which appeared in 
1868-70 as 'The Earthly Paradise.' Shortly after this he 
became especially interested in Icelandic literature and 



I 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 339 

published versions of some of its stories, notably one of 
the Siegfried tale, 'Sigurd the Volsung.' In the decade 
from 1880 to 1890 he devoted most of his energy to work 
for the Socialist party, of which he became a leader. His 
ideals were largely identical with those of Ruskin ; in par- 
ticular he wished to restore (or create) in the lives of 
workingmen conditions which should make of each of them 
an independent artist. The practical result of his experi- 
ence was bitter disappointment, he was deposed from his 
leadership, finally abandoned the party, and returned to 
art and literature. He now published a succession of prose 
romances largely inspired by the Icelandic sagas and com- 
posed in a strange half -archaic style. He also established 
the 'Kelmscott Press,' which he made famous for its 
production of elaborate artistic editions of great books. He 
died in 1896. 

Morris' shorter poems are strikingly dramatic and pic- 
turesque, and his longer narrations are remarkably facile 
and often highly pleasing. His facility, however, is his 
undoing. He sometimes wrote as much as eight hundred 
lines in a day, and he once declared: 'If a chap can't 
compose an epic poem while he's weaving tapestry, he 
had better shut up ; he '11 never do any good at all. ' In 
reading his work one always feels that there is the ma- 
terial of greatness, but perhaps nothing that he wrote is 
strictly great. His prose will certainly prove less per- 
manent than his verse. 

Swinburne. A younger disciple of the Pre-Raphaelite 
Movement but also a strongly original artist was Algernon 
Charles Swinburne. Born in 1837 into a wealthy family, 
the son of an admiral, he devoted himself throughout his 
life wholly to poetry, and his career was almost altogether 
devoid of external incident. After passing through Eton 
and Oxford he began as author at twenty-three by publish- 
ing two plays imitative of Shakspere. Five years later he 
put forth ' Atalanta in Calydon, ' a tragedy not only drawn 
from Greek heroic legend, but composed in the ancient 
Greek manner, with long dialogs and choruses. These 
two volumes express the two intensely vigorous forces which 
were strangely combined in his nature; for while no man 
has ever been a more violent romanticist than Swinburne, 
yet, as one critic has said, 'All the romantic riot in his 



340 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

blood clamored for GLreek severity and Greek restraint.' 
During the next fifteen years he was partly occupied with 
a huge poetic trilogy in blank verse on Mary Queen of 
Scots, and from time to time he wrote other dramas and 
much prose criticism, the latter largely in praise of the 
Elizabethan dramatists and always wildly extravagant in 
tone. He produced also some long narrative poems, of 
which the chief is 'Tristram of Lyonesse.' His chief im- 
portance, however, is as a lyric poet, and his lyric produc- 
tion was large. His earlier poems in this category are for 
the most part highly objectionable in substance or senti- 
ment, but he gradually worked into a better vein. He 
was a friend of George Meredith, Burne-Jones, Morris, 
Rossetti (to whom he loyally devoted himself for years), 
and the painter Whistler. He died in 1909. 

Swinburne carried his radicalism into all lines. Though 
an ardently patriotic Englishman, he was an extreme re- 
publican; and many of his poems are dedicated to the 
cause of Italian independence or to liberty in general. 
The significance of his thought, however, is less than that 
of any other English poet who can in any sense be called 
great; his poetry is notable chiefly for its artistry, espe- 
cially for its magnificent melody. Indeed, it has been 
cleverly said that he offers us an elaborate service of gold 
and silver, but with little on it except salt and pepper. 
In his case, however, the mere external beauty and power 
often seem their own complete and satisfying justification. 
His command of different meters is marvelous ; he uses 
twice as many as Browning, who is perhaps second to him 
in this respect, and his most characteristic ones are those 
of gloriously rapid anapestic lines with complicated rime- 
schemes. Others of his distinctive traits are lavish allitera- 
tion, rich sensuousness, grandiose vagueness of thought and 
expression, a great sweep of imagination, and a correspond- 
ing love of vastness and desolation. He makes much decora- 
tive use of Biblical imagery and of vague abstract per- 
sonifications — in general creates an atmosphere similar to 
that of Rossetti. Somewhat as in the case of Morris, his 
fluency is almost fatal — he sometimes pours out his melo- 
dious but vague emotion in forgetfulness of all proportion 
and restraint. Prom the intellectual and spiritual point 
of view he is nearly negligible, but as a musician in words 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 341 

he has no superior, not even Shelley. 

Other Victorian Poets. Among the other Victorian 
poets, three, at least, must be mentioned. Arthur Hugh 
Clough (1819-1861), tutor at Oxford and later examiner 
in the government education office, expresses the spiritual 
doubt and struggle of the period in noble poems similar 
to those of Matthew Arnold, whose fine elegy 'Thyrsis' 
commemorates him. Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), Irish 
by birth, an eccentric though kind-hearted recluse, and a 
friend of Tennyson, is known solely for his masterly para- 
phrase (1859) of some of the Quatrains of the skeptical 
eleventh- century Persian astronomer-poet Omar Khay- 
yam. The similarity of temper between the medieval 
oriental scholar and the questioning phase of the Vic- 
torian period is striking (though the spirit of Fitzgerald's 
verse is no doubt as much his own as Omar's), and no 
poetry is more poignantly beautiful than the best of this. 
Christina Rossetti (1830-94), the sister of Dante Gabriel 
Rossetti, lived in London with her mother in the greatest 
seclusion, occupied with an ascetic devotion to the Eng- 
lish Church, with her poetry, and with the composition, 
secondarily, of prose articles and short stories. Her 
poetry is limited almost entirely to the lyrical expression 
of her spiritual experiences, much of it is explicitly re- 
ligious, and all of it is religious in feeling. It is tinged 
with the Pre-Raphaelite mystic medievalism; and a quiet 
and most affecting sadness is its dominant trait; but the 
power and beauty of a certain small part of it perhaps en- 
title her to be called the chief of English poetesses. 

The Novel. The Earlier Secondary Novelists. To 
Scott's position of unquestioned supremacy among ro- 
mancers and novelists Charles Dickens succeeded almost 
immediately on Scott's death, but certain secondary early 
Victorian novelists may be considered before him. In the 
lives of two of these, Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli, 
there are interesting parallels. Both were prominent in 
politics, both began writing as young men before the com- 
mencement of the Victorian period, and both ended their 
literary work only fifty years later. Edward Bulwer, 
later created Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and finally raised 
to the peerage as Lord Lytton (1803-1873), was almost 
incredibly fluent and versatile. Much of his life a member 



342 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of Parliament and for a while of the government, he was 
a vigorous pamphleteer. His sixty or more really literary 
works are of great variety; perhaps the best known of 
them are his second novel, the trifling 'Pelham' (1828), 
which inaugurated a class of so-called 'dandy' novels, 
giving sympathetic presentation to the more frivolous social 
life of the 'upper' class, and the historical romances 'The 
Last Days of Pompeii' (1834) and 'Harold' (1843). In 
spite of his real ability, Bulwer was a poser and sentimen- 
talist, characteristics for which he was vigorously ridiculed 
by Thackeray. Benjamin Disraeli,* later Earl of Bea- 
consfield (1804-1881), a much less prolific writer, was by 
birth a Jew. His immature earliest novel, 'Vivian Grey' 
(1826), deals, somewhat more sensibly, with the same social 
class as Bulwer 's 'Pelham.' In his novels of this period, 
as in his dress and manner, he deliberately attitudinized, 
a fact which in part reflected a certain shallowness of 
character, in part was a device to attract attention for 
the sake of his political ambition. After winning his 
way into Parliament he wrote in 1844-7 three political 
novels, ' Coningsby, ' ' Sybil, ' and ' Tancred, ' which set forth 
his Tory creed of opposition to the dominance of middle- 
class Liberalism. For twenty-five years after this he was 
absorbed in the leadership of his party, and he at last 
became Prime Minister. In later life he so far returned 
to literature as to write two additional novels. 

Vastly different was the life and work of Charlotte 
Bronte (1816-1855). Miss Bronte, a product and embodi- 
ment of the strictest religious sense of duty, somewhat 
tempered by the liberalizing tendency of the time, was the 
daughter of the rector of a small and bleak Yorkshire vil- 
lage, Haworth, where she was brought up in poverty. The 
two of her sisters who reached maturity, Emily and Anne, 
both still more short-lived than she, also wrote novels, and 
Emily produced some lyrics which strikingly express the 
stern, defiant will that characterized all the children of 
the family. Their lives were pitifully bare, hard, and 
morbid, scarcely varied or enlivened except by a year 
which Charlotte and Emily spent when Charlotte was 
twenty-six in a private school in Brussels, followed on 

* The second syllable is pronounced like the word 'rail' and has 
the accent, so that the whole name is Bisraily. 



THE VICTOBIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 343 

Charlotte's part by a return to the same school for a 
year as teacher. In 1847 Charlotte's novel 'Jarie_Eyre' 
(pronounced like the word 'air') won a great success. Her 
three later novels are less significant. In 1854 she was 
married to one of her father's curates, a Mr. Nicholls, a 
sincere but narrow-minded man. She was happy in the 
marriage, but died within a few months, worn out by the 
unremitting physical and moral strain of forty years. 

The significance of 'Jane Eyre' can be suggested by 
calling it the last striking expression of extravagant Ro- 
manticism, partly Byronic, but grafted on the stern 
Bronte moral sense. One of its two main theses is the 
assertion of the supreme authority of religious duty, but 
it vehemently insists also on the right of the individual 
conscience to judge of duty for itself, in spite of conven- 
tional opinion, and, difficult as this may be to understand 
to-day, it was denounced at the time as irreligious. The 
Romanticism appears further in the volcanic but some- 
times melodramatic power of the love story, where the 
heroine is a somewhat idealized double of the authoress 
and where the imperfect portrayal of the hero reflects the 
limitations of Miss Bronte's own experience. 

Miss Bronte is the subject of one of the most delightfully 
sympathetic of all biographies, written by Mrs. Elizabeth 
Cleghorn Gaskell. Mrs. Gaskell was authoress also of many 
stories, long and short, of which the best known is 'Cran- 
ford' (1853), a charming portrayal of the quaint life of 
a secluded village. 

Charles Dickens.* The most popular of all English 
novelists, Charles Dickens, was born in 1812, the son of 
an unpractical and improvident government navy clerk 
whom, with questionable taste, he later caricatured in 
'David Copperfield' as Mr. Micawber. The future novelist's 
schooling was slight and irregular, but as a boy he read 
much fiction, especially seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
tury authors, whose influence is apparent in the 
picaresque lack of structure of his own works. From 
childhood also he showed the passion for the drama and the 
theater which resulted from the excitably dramatic quality 
of his own temperament and which always continued to be 

* The life of Dickens by his friend John Forster is another of 
the most famous English biographies. 



344 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the second moving force of his life. When he was ten 
years old his father was imprisoned for debt (like Micaw- 
ber, in the Marshalsea prison), and he was put to work in 
the cellar of a London shoe-blacking factory. On his proud 
and sensitive disposition this humiliation, though it lasted 
only a few months, inflicted a wound which never thor- 
oughly healed; years after he was famous he would cross 
the street to avoid the smell from an altogether different 
blacking factory, with its reminder 'of what he once was.' 
To this experience, also, may evidently be traced no small 
part of the intense sympathy with the oppressed poor, 
especially with helpless children, which is so prominent in 
his novels. Obliged from the age of fifteen to earn his own 
living, for the most part, he was for a while a clerk in a 
London lawyer's office, where he observed all sorts and 
conditions of people with characteristic keenness. Still 
more valuable was his five or six years' experience in the 
very congenial and very active work of a newspaper re- 
porter, where his special department was political affairs. 
This led up naturally to his permanent work. The success- 
ful series of lively 'Sketches by Boz' dealing with people 
and scenes about London was preliminary to 'The Pickwick 
Papers,' which made the author famous at the age of 
twenty-four. 

During the remaining thirty-three years of his life 
Dickens produced novels at the rate of rather more than 
one in two years. He composed slowly and carefully but 
did not revise greatly, and generally published by monthly 
installments in periodicals which, latterly, he himself estab- 
lished and edited. Next after 'The Pickwick Papers' 
came 'Oliver Twist,' and 'Davi d Co pperfield' ten years 
later. Of the others, 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' 'Dombey and 
Son,' 'Bleak House,' and 'A Tale of _Two Cities,' are among 
the best. For some years Dickens also published an an- 
nual Christmas story, of which the first two, 'A Christmas 
Carol' and 'The Chimes,' rank highest. 

His exuberant physical energy gave to his life more ex- 
ternal variety than is common with authors. At the age 
of thirty he made a visit to the United States and travelled 
as far as to the then extreme western town of St. Louis, 
everywhere received and entertained with the most ex- 
travagant enthusiasm. Even before his return to Eng- 



i 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 345 

land, however, he excited a reaction by his abundantly 
justified but untactful condemnation of American piracy 
of English books; and this reaction was confirmed by his 
subsequent caricature of American life in 'American 
Notes' and 'Martin Chuzzlewit.' For a number of yeart? 
during the middle part of his career Dickens devoted a vast 
amount of energy to managing and taking the chief part 
in a company of amateur actors, who performed at times 
in various cities. Later on he substituted for this several 
prolonged series of semi-dramatic public readings from 
his works, an effort which drew heavily on his vitality and 
shortened his life, but which intoxicated him with its 
enormous success. One of these series was delivered in 
America, where, of course, the former ill-feeling had long 
before worn away. 

Dickens lived during the greater part of his life in 
London, but in his later years near Rochester, at Gadsbill. 
the scene of Falstaff's exploit. He made long sojourns 
also on the Continent. Much social and outdoor life was 
necessary to him; he had a theory that he ought to spend 
as much time out of doors as in the house. He married 
early and had a large family of children, but pathetically 
enough for one whose emotions centered so largely about 
the home, his own marriage was not well-judged ; and 
after more than twenty years he and his wife (the Dora 
Spenlow of 'David Copperfield') separated, though with 
mutual respect. He died in 1870 and was buried in West- 
minster Abbey in the rather ostentatiously unpretentious 
way which, with his deep-seated dislike for aristocratic 
conventions, he had carefully prescribed in his will. 

Dickens' popularity, in his own day and since, is due 
chiefly: (1) to his intense human sympathy; (2) to his 
unsurpassed emotional and dramatic power; and (3) to his 
aggressive humanitarian zeal for the reform of all evils 
and abuses, whether they weigh upon the oppressed classes 
or upon helpless individuals. Himself sprung from the 
lower middle class, and thoroughly acquainted with the 
life of the poor and apparently of sufferers in all ranks, he 
is one of the most moving spokesmen whom they have 
ever had. The pathos and tragedy of their experiences 
— aged and honest toilers subjected to pitiless task-masters 
or to the yoke of social injustice ; lonely women uncom- 



346 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

plainingly sacrificing their lives for unworthy men; sad- 
faced children, the victims of circumstances, of cold-blooded 
parents, or of the worst criminals — these things play a 
large part in almost all of Dickens' books. In almost all, 
moreover, there is present, more or less in the foreground, 
a definite humanitarian aim, an attack on some time- 
consecrated evil — the poor-house system, the cruelties prac- 
tised in private schools, or the miscarriage of justice in the 
Court of Chancery. In dramatic vividness his great scenes 
are masterly, for example the storm in 'David Copper- 
field, ' the pursuit and discovery of Lady Dedlock in ' Bleak 
House, ' and the interview between Mrs. Dombey and James 
Carker in 'Dombey and Son.' 

Dickens' magnificent emotional power is not balanced, 
however, by a corresponding intellectual quality; in his 
work, as in his temperament and bearing, emotion is always 
in danger of running to excess. One of his great elements 
of strength is his sense of humor, which has created an 
almost unlimited number of delightful scenes and char- 
acters; but it very generally becomes riotous and so ends 
in sheer farce and caricature, as the names of many of 
the characters suggest at the outset. Indeed Dickens has 
been rightly designated a grotesque novelist — the greatest 
of all grotesque novelists. Similarly his pathos is often 
exaggerated until it passes into mawkish sentimentality, so 
that his humbly-bred heroines, for example, are made to 
act and talk with all the poise and certainty which can 
really spring only from wide experience and broad educa- 
tion. Dickens' zeal for reform, also, sometimes outruns 
his judgment or knowledge and leads him to assault evils 
that had actually been abolished long before he wrote. 

No other English author has approached Dickens in the 
number of characters whom he has created; his twenty 
novels present literally thousands of persons, almost all 
thoroughly human, except for the limitations that we have 
already noted. Their range is of course very great, though 
it never extends successfully into the 'upper' social classes. 
For Dickens was violently prejudiced against the nobility 
and against all persons of high social standing, and when 
he attempted to introduce them created only pitifully 
wooden automatons. For the actual English gentleman 
we must pass by his Sir Leicester Dedlocks and his Mr. Ve- 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 347 

neerings to novelists of a very different viewpoint, such 
as Thackeray and. Meredith. 

Dickens' inexhaustible fertility in characters and scenes 
is a main cause of the rather extravagant lack of unity 
which is another conspicuous feature of his books. He 
usually made a good preliminary general plan and pro- 
ceeded on the whole with firm movement and strong sus- 
pense. But he always introduces many characters and sub- 
actions not necessary to the main story, and develops them 
quite beyond their real artistic importance. Not without 
influence here was the necessity of filling a specified number 
of serial instalments, each of a definite number of pages, 
and each requiring a striking situation at the end. More- 
over, Dickens often follows the eighteenth- century picar- 
esque habit of tracing the histories of his heroes from birth 
to marriage. In most respects, however, Dickens' art im- 
proved as he proceeded. The love element, it should be 
noted, as what we have already said implies, plays a smaller 
part than usual among the various aspects of life which 
his books present. 

Not least striking among Dickens' traits is his power of 
description. His observation is very quick and keen, 
though not fine; his sense for the characteristic features, 
whether of scenes in Nature or of human personality and 
appearance, is unerring; and he has never had a superior 
in picturing and conveying the atmosphere both of in- 
teriors and of all kinds of scenes of human life. London, 
where most of his novels are wholly or chiefly located, has 
in him its chief and most comprehensive portrayer. 

Worthy of special praise, lastly, is the moral soundness 
of all Dickens' work, praise which is not seriously affected 
by present-day sneers at his 'middle-class' and 'mid- Vic- 
torian' point of view. Dickens' books, however, like his 
character, are destitute of the deeper spiritual quality, of 
poetic and philosophic idealism. His stories are all ad- 
mirable demonstrations of the power and beauty of the 
nobler practical virtues, of kindness, courage, humility, 
and all the other forms of unselfishness ; but for the under- 
lying mysteries of life and the higher meanings of art his 
positive and self-formed mind had very little feeling. From 
first to last he speaks authentically for the common heart 
of humanity, but he is not one of the rarer spirits, like 



348 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Spenser or George Eliot or Meredith, who transport us into 
the realm of the less tangible realities. All his limitations, 
indeed, have become more conspicuous as time has passed ; 
and critical judgment has already definitely excluded him 
from the select ranks of the truly greatest authors. 

William M. Thackeray. Dickens' chief rival for fame 
during his later lifetime and afterward was Thackeray, 
who presents a strong contrast with him, both as man and 
as writer. 

Thackeray, the son of an East India Company official, 
was born at Calcutta in 1811. His father died while he 
was a child and he was taken to England for his education ; 
he was a student in the Charterhouse School and then 
for a year at Cambridge. Next, on the Continent, he 
studied drawing, and though his unmethodical and some- 
what idle habits prevented him from ever really mastering 
the technique of the art, his real knack for it enabled 
him later on to illustrate his own books in a semi-grotesque 
but effective fashion. Desultory study of the law was in- 
terrupted when he came of age by the inheritance of a 
comfortable fortune, which he managed to lose within a 
year or two by gambling, speculations, and an unsuccessful 
effort at carrying on a newspaper. Real application to 
newspaper and magazine writing secured him after four 
years a place on 'Fraser's Magazine,' and he was mar- 
ried. Not long after, his wife became insane, but his warm 
affection for his daughters gave him throughout his life 
genuine domestic happiness. 

For ten years Thackeray's production was mainly in 
the line of satirical humorous and picaresque fiction, none 
of it of the first rank. During this period he chiefly at- 
tacked current vices, snobbishness, and sentimentality, 
which latter quality, Thackeray 's special aversion, he found 
rampant in contemporary life and literature, including 
the novels of Dickens. The appearance of his master- 
piece, 'Vanity Fair' (the allegorical title taken from a fa- 
mous incident in 'Pilgrim's Progress'), in 'Fraser's Maga- 
zine' in 1847-8 (the year before Dickens' 'David Copper- 
field') brought him sudden fame and made him a social 
lion. Within the next ten years he produced his other 
important novels, of which the best are ' Pendennis, ' ' Henry 
Esmond,' and 'The Ncwcomes,' and also his charming 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 349 

i 

essays (first delivered as lectures) on the eighteenth cen- 
tury in England, namely ' English Humorists,' and 'The 
Pour Georges.' All his novels except 'Henry Esmond' 
were published serially, and he generally delayed compos- 
ing each instalment until the latest possible moment, work- 
ing reluctantly except under the stress of immediate com- 
pulsion. He was for three years, at its commencement, 
editor of ' The Cornhill Magazine. ' He died in 1863 at the 
age of fifty-two, of heart failure. 

The great contrast between Dickens and Thackeray re- 
sults chiefly from the predominance in Thackeray of the 
critical intellectual quality and of the somewhat fastidious 
instinct of the man of society and of the world which 
Dickens so conspicuously lacked. As a man Thackeray was 
at home and at ease only among people of formal good 
breeding ; he shrank from direct contact with the common 
people ; in spite of his assaults on the frivolity and vice of 
fashionable society, he was fond of it ; his spirit was very 
keenly analytical; and he would have been chagrined by 
nothing more than by seeming to allow his emotion to get 
the better of his judgment. His novels seem to many 
readers cynical, because he scrutinizes almost every char- 
acter and every group with impartial vigor, dragging forth 
every fault and every weakness into the light. On the 
title page of 'Vanity Fair' he proclaims that it is a novel 
without a hero; and here, as in some of his lesser works, 
most of the characters are either altogether bad or worth- 
less and the others very largely weak or absurd, so that 
the impression of human life which the reader apparently 
ought to carry away is that of a hopeless chaos of selfish- 
ness, hypocrisy, and futility. One word, which has often 
been applied to Thackeray, best expresses his attitude — 
disillusionment. The last sentences of 'Vanity Fair' are 
characteristic : ' Oh ! Vanitas Vanitatum ! which of us is 
happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, 
having it, is satisfied? — Come, children, let us shut the 
box and the puppets, for our play is played out.' 

Yet in reality Thackeray is not a cynic and the perma- 
nent impression left by his books is not pessimistic. Be- 
neath his somewhat ostentatious manner of the man of the 
world were hidden a heart and a human sympathy as 
warm as ever belonged to any man. However he may 



350 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ridicule his heroes and his heroines (and there really 
are a hero and heroine in 'Vanity Fair'), he really feels 
deeply for them, and he is repeatedly unable to refrain 
from the expression of his feeling. Nothing is more truly 
characteristic of him than the famous incident of his rush- 
ing in tears from the room in which he had been writing 
of the death of Colonel Newcome with the exclamation, 
'I have killed the Colonel!' In his books as clearly as in 
those of the most explicit moralizer the reader finds the 
lessons that simple courage, honesty, kindliness, and un- 
selfishness are far better than external show, and that in 
spite of all its brilliant interest a career of unprincipled 
self-seeking like that of Becky Sharp is morally squalid. 
Thackeray steadily refuses to falsify life as he sees it in the 
interest of any deliberate theory, but he is too genuine an 
artist not to be true to the moral principles which form so 
large a part of the substratum of all life. 

Thackeray avowedly took Fielding as his model, and 
though his spirit and manner are decidedly finer than 
Fielding's, the general resemblance between them is often 
close. Fielding's influence shows partly in the humorous 
tone which, in one degree or another, Thackeray preserves 
wherever it is possible, and in the general refusal to take 
his art, on the surface, with entire seriousness. He in- 
sists, for instance, on his right to manage his story, and 
conduct the reader, as he pleases, without deferring to his 
readers' tastes or prejudices. Fielding's influence shows 
also in the free-and-easy picaresaue structure of his plots ; 
though this results also in part from his desultorv method' 
of composition. Thackeray's great fault is prolixity; he 
sometimes wanders on through rather uninspired page 
after page where the reader longs for severe compression. 
But when the story reaches dramatic moments there is 
ample compensation ; no novelist has more magnificent 
power in dramatic scenes, such, for instance, as in the 
climactic series in 'Vanity Fair.' This power is based 
largely on an absolute knowleds-e of character: in spite of 
a delight in somewhat fanciful exaggeration of the 
ludicrous. Thackeray when he chooses portrays human 
nature with absolute finality. 

'Henry Esmond' should be spoken of by itself as a 
special and unique achievement. It is a historical novel 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 351 

dealing with the early eighteenth century, and in preparing 
for it Thackeray read and assimilated most of the litera- 
ture of the period, with the result that he succeeded in 
reproducing the 'Augustan' spirit and even its literary 
style with an approach to perfection that has never been 
rivaled. On other grounds as well the book ranks almost 
if not quite beside 'Vanity Fair.' Henry Esmond him- 
self is Thackeray's most thoroughly wise and good char- 
acter, and Beatrix is as real and complex a woman as 
even Becky Sharp. 

George Eliot. The perspective of time has made it 
clear that among the Victorian novelists, as among the 
poets, three definitely surpass the others. With Dickens 
and Thackeray is to be ranked only 'George Eliot' (Mary 
Anne Evans). 

George Eliot was born in 1819 in the central county of 
Warwick from which Shakspere had sprung two cen- 
turies and a half before. Her father, a manager of estates 
for various members of the landed gentry, was to a large 
extent the original both of her Adam Bede and of Caleb 
Garth in ' Middlemarch, ' while her own childish life is 
partly reproduced in the experiences of Maggie in 'The 
Mill on the Floss.' Endowed with one of the strongest 
minds that any woman has ever possessed, from her very 
infancy she studied and read widely. Her nature, how- 
ever, was not one-sided; all her life she was passionately 
fond of music; and from the death of her mother in her 
eighteenth year she demonstrated her practical capacity in 
the management of her father's household. Circumstances 
combined with her unusual ability to make her entire life 
one of too high pressure, and her first struggle was re- 
ligious. She was brought up a Methodist, and during her 
girlhood was fervently evangelical, in the manner of Dinah 
Morris in 'Adam Bede'; but moving to Coventry she fell 
under the influence of some rationalistic acquaintances 
who led her to adopt the scientific Positivism of the French 
philosopher Comte. Her first literary work, growing out 
of the same interest, was the formidable one of translating 
the 'Life of Jesus' of the German professor Strauss. Some 
years of conscientious nursing of her father, terminated 
by his death, were followed by one in Geneva, nominally 
a year of vacation, but she spent it largely in the study 



352 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of experimental physics. On her return to England she 
became a contributor and soon assistant editor of the 
liberal periodical 'The Westminster Review.' This con- 
nection was most important in its personal results; it 
brought her into contact with a versatile man of letters, 
George Henry Lewes,* and in 1854 they were united as 
man and wife. Mr. Lewes had been unhappily married 
years before to a woman who was still alive, and English 
law did not permit the divorce which he would have secured 
in America. Consequently the new union was not a legal 
marriage, and English public opinion was severe in its 
condemnation. In the actual result the sympathetic com- 
panionship of Mr. Lewes was of the greatest value to 
George Eliot and brought her much happiness; yet she 
evidently felt keenly the equivocal social position, and it 
was probably in large part the cause of the increasing 
sadness of her later years. 

She was already thirty- six when in 1856 she entered 
on creative authorship with the three ' Scenes from Clerical 
Life. ' The pseudonym which she adopted for these and her 
later stories originated in no more substantial reason than 
her fondness for 'Eliot' and the fact that Mr. Lewes' 
first name was 'George.' 'Adam Bede' in 1859 completely 
established her reputation, and her six or seven other 
books followed as rapidly as increasingly laborious work- 
manship permitted. 'Romola,'f in 1863, a powerful but 
perhaps over-substantial historical novel, was the out- 
come partly of residence in Florence. Not content with 
prose, she attempted poetry also, but she altogether lacked 
the poet's delicacy of both imagination and expression. The 
death of Mr. Lewes in 1878 was a severe blow to her, since 
she was always greatly dependent on personal sympathy; 
and after a year and a half, to the surprise of every one, 
she married Mr. John W. Cross, a banker much younger 
than herself. But her own death followed within a few 
months in 1880. 

George Eliot's literary work combines in an interesting 
way the same distinct and even strangly contrasting ele- 
ments as her life, and in her writings their relative pro- 
portions alter rather markedly during the course of her 

* Pronounced in two syllables. 

f Accented on the first syllable. .... v 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 353 

career. One of the most attractive qualities, especially in 
her earlier books, is her warm and unaffected human sym- 
pathy, which is temperamental, but greatly enlarged by her 
own early experience. The aspiration, pathos and tragedy 
of life, especially among the lower and middle classes in 
the country and the small towns, can scarcely be in- 
terpreted with more feeling, tenderness, or power than in 
her pages. But her sympathy does not blind her to the 
world of comedy; figures like Mrs. Poyser in 'Adam Bede' 
are delightful. Even from the beginning, however, the 
really controlling forces in George Eliot's work were in- 
tellectual and moral. She started out with the determina- 
tion to render the facts of life with minute and con- 
scientious accuracy, an accuracy more complete than that 
of Mrs. Gaskell. who was in large degree her model; and 
as a result her books, from the beginning, are masterpieces 
of the best sort of realism. The characters, life, and back- 
grounds of many of them are taken from her own "War- 
wickshire acquaintances and country, and for the others 
she made the most painstaking study. More fundamental 
than her sympathy, indeed, perhaps even from the outset, 
is her instinct for scientific analysis. Like a biologist or 
a botanist, and with much more deliberate effort than most 
of her fellow-craftsmen, she traces and scrutinizes all the 
acts and motives of her characters until she reaches and 
reveals their absolute inmost truth. This objective scien- 
tific method has a tendency to become sternly judicial, and 
in extreme cases she even seems to be using her weak or 
imperfect characters as deterrent examples. Inevitably, 
with her disposition, the scientific tendency grew upon her. 
Beginning with ' Middlemarch ' (1872), which is perhaps 
her masterpiece, it seems to some critics decidedly too pre- 
ponderant, giving to her novels too much the atmosphere 
of psychological text-books ; and along with it goes much 
introduction of the actual facts of nineteenth century 
science. Her really primary instinct, however, is the 
moral one. The supremacy of moral law may fairly be 
called the general theme of all her works ; to demonstrating 
it her scientific method is really in the main auxiliary ; 
and in spite of her accuracy it makes of her more an 
idealist than a realist. W 7 ith unswerving logic she traces 
the sequence of act and consequence, showing how ap- 



354 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

parently trifling words and deeds reveal the springs of 
character and how careless choices and seemingly insignifi- 
cant self-indulgences may altogether determine the issues 
of life. The couplet from Jftschylus which she prefixed 
to one of the chapters of 'Felix Holt' might stand at the 
outset of all her work: 

J Tis law as steadfast as the throne of Zeus — 
Our days are heritors of days gone by. 

Her conviction, or at least her purpose, is optimistic, to 
show that by honest effort the sincere and high-minded 
man or woman may win happiness in the face of all diffi- 
culties and disappointments ; but her own actual judgment 
of life was somber, not altogether different from that 
which Carlyle repudiated in 'The Everlasting Yea'; so 
that the final effect of her books, though stimulating, is 
subdued rather than cheerful. 

In technique her very hard work generally assured 
mastery. Her novels are firmly knit and well-propor- 
tioned, and have the inevitable movement of life itself; 
while her great scenes equal those of Thackeray in dramatic 
power and, at their best, in reserve and suggestiveness. 
Perhaps her chief technical faults are tendencies to pro- 
lixity and too much expository analysis of characters and 
motives. 

Secondary Middle and Later Victorian Novelists. Sev- 
eral of the other novelists of the mid-century and later pro- 
duced work which in a period of less prolific and less highly 
developed art would have secured them high distinction. 
Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) spent most of his life, by 
his own self-renouncing choice, as curate and rector of 
the little Hampshire parish of Eversley, though for some 
years he " also held the professorship of history at Cam- 
bridge. An aggressive Protestant, he drifted in his later 
years into the controversy with Cardinal Newman which 
opened the way for Newman's 'Apologia.' From the out- 
set, Kingsley was an enthusiastic worker with F. D. 
Maurice in the Christian Socialist movement which aimed 
at the betterment of the conditions of life among the work- 
ing classes. 'Alton Locke' and 'Yeast,' published in 1849, 
were powerful but reasonable and very influential expres- 
sions of his convictions — fervid arguments in the form of 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 355 

fiction against existing social injustices. His most famous 
books are 'Hypatia' (1853), a novel dealing with the 
Church in its conflict with Greek philosophy in fifth- 
century Alexandria, and '"Westward Ho!' (1855) which 
presents with sympathetic largeness of manner the ad- 
venturous side of Elizabethan life. His brief ' Andromeda ' 
is one of the best English poems in the classical dactylic 
hexameter. 

Charles Reade (1814-1881), a man of dramatic disposi- 
tion somewhat similar to that of Dickens (though Reade 
had a University education and was admitted to the bar), 
divided his interest and fiery energies between the drama 
and the novel. But while his plays were of such doubtful 
quality that he generally had to pay for having them 
acted, his novels were often strong and successful. Per- 
sonally he was fervently evangelical, and like Dickens he 
was often inspired to write by indignation at social wrongs. 
His 'Hard Cash' (1863). which attacks private insane 
asylums, is powerful ; but his most important work is ' The 
Cloister and the Hearth' (1861). one of the most inform- 
ing and vivid of all historical novels, with the father of 
Erasmus for its hero. Xo novelist can be more thrilling 
and picturesque than Reade. but he lacks restraint and is 
often highly sensational and melodramatic. 

Altogether different is the method of Anthony Trollope 
(1815-1882) in his fifty novels. Trollope. long a traveling 
employe in the post-office service, was a man of very asser- 
tive and somewhat commonplace nature. Partly a disciple 
of Thackeray, he went beyond Thackeray's example in the 
refusal to take his art altogether seriously as an art; 
rather, he treated it as a form of business, sneering at the 
idea of special inspiration, and holding himself rigidly to 
a mechanical schedule of composition — a definite and 
unvarying number of pages in a specified number of hours 
on each of his working days. The result is not so dis- 
astrous as might have been expected : his novels have no 
small degree of truth and interest, The most notable are 
the half dozen which deal with ecclesiastical life in his 
imaginary county of Barsetshire. beginning with 'The 
TTarden' and 'Barchester Towers.' His 'Autobiography' 
furnishes in some of its chapters one of the noteworthy 
existing discussions of the writer's art by a member of the 



356 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

profession. 

Richard Blackmore (1825-1900), first a lawyer, later 
manager of a market-garden, was the author of numerous 
novels, but will be remembered only for 'Lorna Doone' 
(1869), a charming reproduction of Devonshire country 
life assigned to the romantic setting of the time of James 
II. Its simple-minded and gigantic hero John Ridd is 
certainly one of the permanent figures of English fiction. 

Joseph H. Shorthouse (1834-1903), a Birmingham chem- 
ical manufacturer, but a man of very fine nature, is like- 
wise to be mentioned for a single book, 'John Inglesant' 
(1881). Located in the middle of the seventeenth century, 
when the strife of religious and political parties afforded 
material especially available for the author's purpose, this 
is a spiritual romance, a High Churchman's assertion of 
the supremacy of the inner over the outer life. From 
this point of view it is one of the most significant of Eng- 
lish novels, and though much of it is philosophical and 
though it is not free from technical faults, parts of it at- 
tain the extreme limit of absorbing narrative interest. 

Walter Pater (1839-1894), an Oxford Fellow, also rep- 
resents distinctly the spirit of unworldliness, which in his 
case led to a personal aloofness from active life. He was 
the master of a delicately-finished, somewhat over-fastidi- 
ous, style, which he employed in essays on the Renaissance 
and other historical and artistic topics and in a spiritual 
romance, 'Marius the Epicurean' (1885). No less note- 
worthy than 'John Inglesant,' and better constructed, this 
latter is placed in the reign of the Roman Emperor Marcus 
Aurelius, but its atmosphere is only in part historically 
authentic. 

George Meredith (1828-1910). Except for a lack of the 
elements which make for popularity, George Meredith 
would hold an unquestioned place in the highest rank of 
novelists. In time he is partly contemporary with George 
Eliot, as he began to publish a little earlier than she. But 
he long outlived her and continued to write to the end of 
his life ; and his recognition was long delayed ; so that he 
may properlv be placed in the group of later Victorian 
novelists. His long life was devoid of external incident; 
he was long a newspaper writer and afterward literary 
reader for a publishing house; he spent his later years 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 357 

quietly in Surrey, enjoying the friendship of Swinburne 
and other men of letters. 

Among novelists he occupies something the same place 
which Browning, a person of very different temperament 
and ideas, holds among poets. He writes only for intelli- 
gent and thoughtful people and aims to interpret the 
deeper things of life and character, not disregarding dra- 
matic external incident, but using it as only one of the 
means to his main purpose. His style is brilliant, epigram- 
matic, and subtile ; and he prefers to imply many things 
rather than to state them directly. All this makes large, 
perhaps sometimes too large, demands on the reader's 
attention, but there is, of course, corresponding stimula- 
tion. Meredith's general attitude toward life is the fine 
one of serene philosophic confidence, the attitude in general 
of men like Shakspere and Goethe. He despises sentimen- 
tality, admires chiefly the qualities of quiet strength and 
good breeding which are exemplified among the best mem- 
bers of the English aristocracy; and in all his interpreta- 
tion is very largely influenced by modern science. His 
virile courage and optimism are as pronounced as those of 
Browning; he wrote a noteworthy 'Essay on Comedy' and 
oftentimes insists on emphasizing the comic rather than 
the tragic aspect of things, though he can also be powerful 
in tragedy ; and his enthusiasms for the beauty of the world 
and for the romance of youthful love are delightful. He 
may perhaps best be approached through 'Evan Harring- 
ton' (1861) and 'The Ordeal of Richard Feverel' (1859). 
'The Egoist' (1879) and 'Diana of the Crossways' (1885) 
are among his other strongest books. In his earlier years 
he wrote a considerable body of verse, which shows much 
the same qualities as his prose. Some of it is rugged in 
form, but other parts magnificently dramatic, and some 
few poems, like the unique and superb 'Love in the Val- 
ley,' charmingly beautiful. 

Thomas Hardy. In Thomas Hardy (born 1840) the 
pessimistic interpretation of modern science is expressed 
frankly and fully, with much the same pitiless consistency 
that distinguishes contemporary European writers such as 
Zola. Mr. Hardy early turned to literature from archi- 
tecture and he has lived a secluded life in southern Ens- 
land, the ancient Wessex, which he makes the scene of all 



358 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

his novels. His knowledge of life is sure and his technique 
in all respects masterly. He has preferred to deal chiefly 
with persons in the middle and poorer classes of society 
because, like Wordsworth, though with very different em- 
phasis, he feels that in their experiences the real facts of 
life stand out most truly. His deliberate theory is a sheer 
fatalism — that human character and action are the in- 
evitable result of laws of heredity and environment over 
which man has no control. 'The Return of the Native' 
(1878) and 'Far from the Madding Crowd' (1874) are 
among his best novels, though the sensational frankness of 
'Tess of the D 'Urbervilles ' (1891) has given it greater 
reputation. 

Stevenson. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), the 
first of the rather prominent group of recent Scotch writ- 
ers of fiction, is as different as possible from Hardy. Des- 
tined for the career of civil engineer and lighthouse builder 
in which his father and grandfather were distinguished, 
he proved unfitted for it by lack both of inclination and 
of health, and the profession of law for which he later 
prepared himself was no more congenial. From boyhood 
he, like Scott, studied human nature with keen delight in 
rambles about the country, and unlike Scott he was in- 
cessantly practising writing merely for the perfection of 
his style. As an author he won his place rather slowly ; and 
his whole mature life was a wonderfully courageous and 
persistent struggle against the sickness which generally 
prevented him from working more than two or three hours 
a day and often kept him for months in bed unable even 
to speak. A trip to California in an emigrant train in 
1879-1880 brought him to death's door but accomplished its 
purpose, his marriage to an American lady, Mrs. Osbourne, 
whom he had previously met in artist circles in France. 
He first secured a popular success with the boys' pirate 
story, 'Treasure Island,' in 1882. 'A Child's Garden of 
Verses' (1885) was at once accepted as one of the most 
irresistibly sympathetic of children's classics; and 'The 
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (1886), a unique 
and astonishingly powerful moral lesson in the form of a 
thrilling little romance which strangely anticipates the 
later discoveries of psychology, made in its different way 
a still stronger impression. Stevenson produced, consider- 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 359 

ing his disabilities, a remarkably large amount of work — 
essays, short stories, and romances — but the only others of 
his books which need here be mentioned are the four 
romances of Scotch life in the eighteenth century which 
belong to his later years; of these 'The Master of Ballan- 
trae' and the fragmentary 'Weir of Hermiston' are the 
best. His letters, also, which, like his widely-circulated 
prayers, reveal his charming and heroic personality, are 
among the most interesting in the history of English Litera- 
ture. His bodily weakness, especially tuberculosis, which 
had kept him wandering from one resort to another, at last 
drove him altogether from Europe to the South Seas. He 
finally settled in Samoa, where for the last half dozen 
years of his life he was busy not only with clearing his 
land, building his house, and writing, but with energetic 
efforts to serve the natives, then involved in broils among 
themselves and with England, Germany, and the United 
States. His death came suddenly when he was only forty- 
four years old, and the Samoans, who ardently appreciated 
what he had done for them, buried him high up on a 
mountain overlooking both his home and the sea. 

Stevenson, in the midst of an age perhaps too intensely 
occupied with the deeper questions, stoocLfor a return to 
the mere spirit of romance, and for occasional reading he 
furnishes delightful recreation. In the last analysis, how- 
ever, his general lack of serious significance condemns him 
at most to a secondary position. At his best his narrative 
technique (as in 'The Master of Ballantrae') is perfect; 
his portrayal of men (he almost never attempted women) 
is equally certain; his style has no superior in English; 
and his delicate sensibility and keenness of observation 
render him a master of description. But in his attitude 
toward life he never reached full maturity (perhaps be- 
cause of the supreme effort of will necessary for the main- 
tenance of his cheerfulness) ; not only did he retain to the 
end a boyish zest for mere adventure, but it is sometimes 
adventure of a melodramatic and unnecessarily disagree- 
able kind, and in his novels and short stories he offers 
virtually no interpretation of the world. No recent English 
prose writer has exercised a wider influence than he, but 
none is likely to suffer as time goes on a greater diminu- 
tion of reputation. 



360 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Rudyard Kipling. The name which naturally closes the 
list of Victorian writers is that of Rudyard Kipling, though 
he belongs, perhaps, as much to the twentieth century as 
to the one preceding. The son of a professor of archi- 
tecture and sculpture in the University of Bombay, India, 
he was born in that city in 1865. Educated in England 
in the United Services College (for officers in the army 
and navy), he returned at the age of seventeen to India, 
where he first did strenuous editorial work on newspapers 
in Lahore, in the extreme northwestern part of the coun- 
try. He secured his intimate knowledge of the English 
army by living, through the permission of the command- 
ing general, with the army on the frontiers. His instinct 
for story-telling in verse and prose had showed itself from 
his boyhood, but his first significant appearance in print 
was in 1886, with a volume of poems later included among 
the 'Departmental Ditties.' ' Plain Tales from the Hills' 
in prose, and other works, followed in rapid succession and 
won him enthusiastic recognition. In 1890 he removed to 
the United States, where he married and remained for 
seven years. Since then he has lived in England, with an 
interval in South Africa. He wrote prolifically during the 
'90 's; since then both the amount of his production and 
its quality have fallen off. 

Kipling is the representative of the vigorous life of 
action as led by manly and efficient men, and of the spirit 
of English imperialism. His poem 'The White Man's 
Burden' sums up his imperialism— the creed that it is the 
duty of the higher races to civilize the lower ones with a 
strong hand ; and he never doubts that the greater part 
of this obligation rests at present upon England — a theory, 
certainly, to which history lends much support. Kipling 
is endowed with the keenest power of observation, with the 
most genuine and most democratic human sympathies, and 
with splendid dramatic force. Consequently he has made 
a unique contribution to literature in his portrayals, in 
both prose and verse, of the English common soldier and of 
English army life on the frontiers of the Empire. On the 
other hand his verse is generally altogether devoid of the 
finer qualities of poetry. 'Danny Deever,' 'Pharaoh and 
the Sergeant,' 'Fuzzy Wuzzy,' 'The Ballad of East and 
West,' 'The Last Chantey,' ' Mulholland 's Contract,' and 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 361 

many others, are splendidly stirring, bnt their colloquialism 
and general realism put them on a very different level 
from the work of the great masters who express the deeper 
truths in forms of permanent beauty. At times, however, 
Kipling too gives voice to religious feelings, of a simple 
sort, in an impressive fashion, as in 'McAndrews' Hymn,' 
'The Recessional,' and 'When earth's last picture is 
painted.' His sweeping rhythms and his grandiose forms 
of expression, suggestive of the vast spaces of ocean and 
plain and of inter-stellar space with which he delights to 
deal, have been very widely copied by minor verse-writers. 
His very vivid and active imagination enables him not only 
to humanize animal life with remarkable success, as in 
the prose 'Jungle-Books,' but to range finely in the realms 
of the mysterious, as in the short stories 'They' and 'The 
Brushwood Boy.' Of short-stories he is the most powerful 
recent writer, as witness ' The Man Who Would Be King, ' 
'The Man Who Was,' 'Without Benefit of Clergy,' and 
'Wee Willie Winkie'; though with all the frankness of 
modern realism he sometimes leads us into scenes of ex- 
treme physical horror. With longer stories he is generally 
less successful; 'Kim,' however, has much power. 

The Historians. The present book, as a brief sketch of 
English Literature rather strictly defined, has necessarily 
disregarded the scientists, economists, and philosophers 
whose writings did much to mold the course of thought 
during the Victorian period. Among the numerous promi- 
nent historians, however, two must be mentioned for the 
brilliant literary quality of their work. James Anthony 
Froude (1818-1894) was a disciple of Carlyle, from whom 
he took the idea of making history center around its great 
men and of giving to it the vivid effectiveness of the drama. 
With Froude too this results in exaggeration, and further 
he is sadly inaccurate, but his books are splendidly fas- 
cinating. His great 'History of England from the Fall 
of Wolsey to the Armada ' is his longest work ; his ' Sketch ' 
of Julius Caesar is certainly one of the most interesting 
books of biography and history ever written. John Rich- 
ard Green (1837-1883), who was a devoted clergyman be- 
fore he became a historian, struggled all his life against 
the ill-health which finally cut short his career. His 'His- 
tory of the English People' is an admirable representative 



362 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of the modern historical spirit, which treats general social 
conditions as more important than mere external events; 
but as a narrative it vies in interest with the very different 
one of Macaulay. Very honorable mention should be made 
also of W. E. H. Lecky, who belongs to the conscientiously 
scientific historical school. His 'History of Rationalism in 
Europe, ' for example, is a very fine monument of the most 
thorough research and most effective statement; but to a 
mature mind its interest is equally conspicuous. 

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

Beginning as early as the latter part of the eigh- 
teenth century literary production, thanks largely to 
the tremendous increase of education and of newspapers 
and magazines, has steadily grown, until now it has reached 
bewildering volume and complexity, in which the old prin- 
ciples are partly merged together and the new tendencies, 
for contemporary observers, at least, scarcely stand out 
with decisive distinctness. Most significant to-day, per- 
haps, are the spirit of independence, now carried in some 
respects beyond the farthest previous Romantic limits, and 
the realistic impulse, in which the former impulses of dem- 
ocracy and humanitarianism play a large part. Pacts not 
to be disregarded are the steady advance of the short story, 
beginning early in the Victorian period or before, to a posi- 
tion of almost chief prominence with the novel ; and the rise 
of American literature to a position approaching equality 
with that of England. Of single authors none have yet cer- 
tainly achieved places of the first rank, but two or three 
may be named. Mr. William De Morgan, by profession a 
manufacturer of artistic pottery, has astonished the world 
by beginning to publish at the age of sixty-five a series of 
novels which show no small amount of Thackeray's power 
combined with too large a share of Thackeray's diffuseness. 
Mr. Alfred Noyes (born 1880) is a refreshingly true lyric 
poet and balladist, and Mr. John Masefield has daringly 
enlarged the field of poetry by frank but very sincere 
treatment of extremely realistic subjects. But none of 
these authors can yet be termed great. About the future 
it is useless to prophesy, but the horrible war of 1914 is 



THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, 1830-1901 -363 

certain to exert for many years a controlling influence on 
the thought and literature of both England and the whole 
world, an influence which, it may be hoped, will ultimately 
prove stimulating and renovating. 

Whatever may be true of the future, the record of the 
past is complete. No intelligent person can give even hasty 
study to the fourteen existing centuries of English Litera- 
ture without being deeply impressed by its range and 
power, or without coming to realize that it stands conspic- 
uous as one of the noblest and fullest achievements of the 
human race. 



A LIST OF AVAILABLE EDITIONS FOE THE STUDY OF 
IMPORTANT AUTHORS 

The author has in preparation an annotated anthology of poems 
from the popular ballads down, exclusive of long poems. In the 
meantime existing anthologies may be used with the present vol- 
ume. The following list includes rather more of the other authors 
than can probably be studied at first hand in one college year. 
The editions named are chosen because they combine inexpensive- 
ness with satisfactory quality. It is the author's experience that 
a sufficient number of them to meet the needs of the class may 
well be supplied by the college. ' Everyman' means the editions 
in the ' Everyman Library' series of Messrs. E. P. Dutton and 
Co.; 'R. L. S.' the 'Riverside Literature Series' of The Houghton 
Mifflin Co. 

Beowulf. Prose translation by Child; R. L. S., cloth, 25 cents. 
Metrical translation by J. L. Hall; D. C. Heath & Co., cloth, 75 
cents, paper, 30 cents. 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Prose translation by Miss 
J. L. Weston, Scribner, 75 cents. 

Chaucer. Among numerous school editions of the Prolog and 
The Knight's Tale may be named one issued by The American 
Book Co., 20 cents. 

Malory's Morte Darthur. Everyman, two vols., 35 cents each. 

The Medieval Drama. Early Plays, ed. Child, R. L. S., cloth, 40 
cents. 'Everyman and Other Plays' (modernized), Everyman, 35 
cents. 

Spenser's Faerie Queene. Everyman, three vols., 35 cents each. 
Vol. I contains Books I and II. 

Elizabethan Lyrics, ed. Schelling, Ginn, 75 cents. 

Marlowe's Plays. Mermaid ed., Scribner, $1.00. 

Shakspere's Plays. Among the most useful 25 cent editions are 
those in the R. L. S., the Arden series of D. C. Heath and Co., 
and the Tudor Series of the Macmillan Co. 

Jonson's Sejanus. Mermaid ed. of Jonson (Scribner), Vol. II, 
$1.00. 

Bacon's Essays. R. L. S., cloth, 40 cents. Everyman, 35 cents. 

Seventeenth Century Lyrics, ed. Schelling, Ginn, 75 cents. 

Milton's Paradise Lost, Astor ed., T. Y. Crowell and Co., 60 
cents, 

Bunyan's Pilgrims' Progress, Everyman, 35 cents. 

Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel. In Satires of Dry den, ed. 
Collins, Macmillan. 

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Everyman. 

Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Everyman. There are two excellent 
volumes of Selections from Swift, ed. Craik, Oxford University 
Press. 

364 



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 365 

The Spectator Papers. Everyman, four vols. 

Samuel Johnson. Selections, ed. Osgood, Henry Holt and Co., 
50 cents. 

Burke. Selections, ed. Perry, Holt, 50 cents. 

Thomson's Seasons. Astor ed., Croweil, 60 cents. 

Macaulay's Essays. Everyman, three vols. Vol. I has the essays 
on Clive and Hastings. 

Oarlyle's Sartor Resartus. Everyman. 

Ruskin. Selections, ed. Tinker, R. L. S., 50 cents. 

Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. Nelson and Sons, 25 cents. 

Nineteenth Century Novels. Largely included in Everyman. 

ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 

These assignments must of course be freely modified in accord- 
ance with actual needs. The discussions of the authors' works 
should sometimes, at least, be made by the student in writing, some- 
times after a day or two of preliminary oral discussion in class. In 
addition to the special questions here included, the treatment of the 
various authors in the text often suggests topics for further consid- 
eration; and of course the material of the preliminary chapter is 
assumed. Any discussion submitted, either orally or in writing, 
may consist of a rather general treatment, dealing briefly with 
several topics; or it may be a fuller treatment of a single topic. 
Students should always express their own actual opinions, using the 
judgments of others, recorded in this book or elsewhere, as helps, 
not as final statements. Students should also aim always to be 
definite, terse, and clear. Do not make such vague general state- 
ments as 'He has good choice of words,' but cite a list of charac- 
teristic words or skilful expressions. As often as possible support 
your conclusions by quotations from the author or by page-number 
references to relevant passages. 

THE ASSIGNMENTS 

1. Above, Chapter I. One day. 

2. 'Beowulf.' Two days. For the first day review the discus- 
sion of the poem above, pp. 33-36; study the additional introductory 
statement which here follows; and read in the poem as much as 
time allows. For the second day continue the reading, at least 
through the story of Beowulf's exploits in Hrothgar's country (in 
Hall's translation through page 75, in Child's through page 60), 
and write your discussion. Better read one day in a prose trans- 
lation, the other in a metrical translation, which will give some idea 
of the effect of the original. 

The historical element in the poem above referred to is this: 
In several places mention is made of the fact that Hygelac, Beo- 
wulf's king, was killed in an expedition in Frisia (Holland), and 
medieval Latin chronicles make mention of the death of a king 
' Chocilaicus' (evidently the same person) in a piratical raid in 512 
A. D. The poem states that Beow r ulf escaped from this defeat by 
swimming, and it is quite possible that he was a real warrior who 
thus distinguished himself* 



366 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The other facts at the basis of the poem are equally uncertain. 
In spite of much investigation we can say of the tribes and locali- 
ties which appear in it only that they are those of the region of 
Scandinavia and Northern Germany. As to date, poems about a 
historical Beowulf, a follower of Hygelac, could not have existed 
before his lifetime in the sixth century, but there is no telling 
how far back the possibly mythical elements may go. The final 
working over of the poem into its present shape, as has been said, 
probably took place in England in the seventh or eighth century; 
in earlier form, perhaps in the original brief ballads, it may have 
been brought to the country either by the Anglo-Saxons or by 
stray 'Danes.' It is fundamentally a heathen work, and certain 
Christian ideas which have been inserted here and there, such as 
the mention of Cain as the ancestor of Grendel, and the disparage- 
ment of heathen gods, merely show that one of the later poets who 
had it in hand was a Christian. 

The genealogical introduction of something over fifty lines (down 
to the first mention of Hrothgar) has nothing to do with the poem 
proper; the Beowulf there mentioned is another person than the 
hero of the poem. In the epic itself we can easily recognize as 
originally separate stories: 1. Beowulf's fight with Grendel. 2. 
His fight with Grendel 's mother. 3. His fight with the flm drake. 
And of course, 4, the various stories referred to or incidentally 
related in brief. 

Subjects for discussion: 1. Narrative qualities, such as Move- 
ment, Proportion, Variety, Suspense. Do the style (terse and sug- 
gestive rather than explicit) and the tendency to digressions seri- 
ously interfere with narrative progress and with the reader's (or 
listener's) understanding? 2. Dramatic vividness of scenes and 
incidents. 3. Descriptive qualities. 4. Do you recognize any 
specifically epic characteristics? 5. Characterization, both in 
general and of individuals. 6. How much of the finer elements of 
feeling does the poet show? What things in Nature does he appre- 
ciate? His sense of pathos and humor? 7. Personal and social 
ideals and customs. 8. The style; its main traits; the effect of the 
figures of speech; are the things used for comparisons in metaphors 
and similes drawn altogether from the outer world, or partly from 
the world of thought? 9. The main merits and defects of the 
poem and its absolute poetic value? 

Written discussions may well begin with a very brief outline of 
the story (not over a single page). 

3. Above, chapter II. One day. 

4. 'Sir G-awain and the Green Knight' (in translation). One 
day. Preliminary, pages 57-58 above. The romance combines two 
stories which belong to the great body of wide-spread popular 
narrative and at first had no connection with each other: 1. The 
beheading story. 2. The temptation. They may have been united 
either by the present author or by some predecessor of his. Sub- 
jects for discussion: 1. Narrative qualities — Unity, Movement, 
Proportion, Variety, Suspense. Is the repetition of . the hunts and 
of Gawain's experience in the castle skilful or the reverse, in plan 
and in execution? 2. Dramatic power — how vivid are the scenes 



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 367 

and experiences? How fully do we sympathize with the charac- 
ters? 3. Power of characterization and of psychological analysis? 
Are the characters types or individuals? 4. Power of description 
of scenes, persons, and Nature? 5. Character of the author? 
Sense of humor? How much fineness of feeling? 6. Theme of the 
story? 7. Do we get an impression of actual life, or of pure 
romance? Note specific details of feudal life. 8. Traits of style, 
such as alliteration and figures of speech, so far as they can be 
judged from the translation. 

5. The period of Chaucer. Above, pages 59-73. One day. 

6. Chaucer's poems. Two or three days. The best poems for 
study are: The Prolog to the Canterbury Tales. The Nuns' 
Priest's Tale. The Knight's Tale. The Squire's Tale. The Prolog 
to the Legend of Good Women. The text, above, pp. 65 ff., sug- 
gests topics for consideration, if general discussion is desired in 
addition to reading of the poems. 

7. The Fifteenth Century and the Popular Ballads. One day. 
Study above, pages 74-77, and read as many ballads as possible. A 
full discussion of the questions of ballad origins and the like is 
to be found in the 'Cambridge' edition (Houghton Mifflin) of 
the ballads, edited by Sargent and Kittredge. In addition to 
matters treated in the text, consider how much feeling the au- 
thors show for Nature, and their power of description. 

8. Malory and Caxton. Two or three days. Study above, 
pages 77-81, and read in Le Morte T)arthur as much as time per- 
mits. Among the best books are: VII, XXI, I, XIII-XVIII. Sub- 
jects for discussion: 1. Narrative qualities. 2. Characteriza- 
tion, including variety of characters. 3. Amount and quality of 
description. 4. How far is the book purely romantic, how far 
does reality enter into it? Consider how much notice is given to 
other classes than the nobility. 5. The style. 

9. The Earlier Medieval Drama, including the Mystery Plays. 
Two days. Above, Chapter IV, through page 88. Among the best 
plays for study are: Abraham and Isaac (Riverside L. S. vol., 
p. 7); The Deluge or others in the Everyman Library vol., pp. 
29-135 (but the play 'Everyman' is not a Mystery play and be 
longs to the next assignment); or any in Manly 's 'Specimens of 
the Pre-Shakespearean Drama,' vol. I, pp. 1-211. The Towneley 
Second Shepherds' Play (so called because it is the second of 
two treatments of the Nativity theme in the Towneley manu- 
script) is one of the most notable plays, but is very coarse. Sub- 
jects for discussion: 1. Narrative structure and qualities. 2. 
Characterization and motivation. 3. How much illusion of reality? 
4. Quality of the religious and human feeling? 5. The humor and 
its relation to religious feeling. 6. Literary excellence of both 
substance and expression (including the verse form). 

10. The Moralities and Interludes. One day. Above, pp. 89-91. 
Students not familiar with 'Everyman' should read it (R. L. S. 
vol., p. 66; Everyman Library vol., p. 1). Further may be read 
'Mundus et Infans' (The World and the Child. Manly 's 'Speci- 
mens,' I, 353). Consider the same questions as in the last assign- 
ment and compare the Morality Plays with the Mysteries in gen- 



368 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

eral excellence and in particular qualities. 

11. The Renaissance, with special study of The Faerie Queene. 
Four days. Above, Chapter V, through page 116. Read a few 
poems of Wyatt and Surrey, especially Wyatt 's 'My lute, awake' 
and ' Forget not yet,' and Surrey's 'Give place, ye lovers, hereto- 
fore.' In 'The Faerie Queene' read the Prefatory Letter and as 
many cantos of Book I (or, if you are familiar with that, of some 
other Books) as you can assimilate — certainly not less than three 
or four cantos. Subjects for discussion: 1. The allegory; its 
success; how minutely should it be applied? 2. Narrative quali- 
ties. 3. The descriptions. 4. General beauty. 5. The romantic 
quality. 6. The language. 7. The stanza, e. g., the variety of 
poetical uses and of treatment in such matters as pauses. The 
teacher may well read to the class the more important portions of 
Lowell's essay on Spenser, which occur in the latter half. 

12. The Elizabethan Lyric Poems. Two days. Above, pages 
117-121. Read as widely as possible in the poems of the authors 
named. Consider such topics as: subjects and moods; general qual- 
ity and its contrast with that of later lyric poetry; emotion, fancy, 
and imagination; imagery; melody and rhythm; contrasts among 
the poems; the sonnets. Do not merely make general statements, 
but give definite references and quotations. For the second day 
make special study of such particularly 'conceited' poems as the 
following and try to explain the conceits in detail and to form 
some opinion of their poetic quality: Lyly's 'Apelles' Song'; 
Southwell's 'Burning Babe'; Ralegh's 'His Pilgrimage'; and two 
or three of Donne's. 

13. The Earlier Elizabethan Drama, with study of Marlowe's 
Tamburlaine, Part I. Two days. Above, Chapter VI, through 
page 129. Historically, Tamerlane was a Mongol (Scythian) 
leader who in the fourteenth century overran most of Western 
Asia and part of Eastern Europe in much the way indicated in 
the play, which is based on sixteenth century Latin lives of him. 
Of course the love element is not historical but added by Marlowe. 
Written discussions should begin with a. very brief outline of the 
story (perhaps half a page). Other matters to consider: 1. Is 
there an abstract dramatic theme? 2. Can, regular dramatic struc- 
ture be traced, with a clear central climax? 3. Variety of scenes? 
4. Qualities of style, e. g., relative prominence of bombast, proper 
dramatic eloquence, and sheer poetry. 5. Qualities, merits, and 
faults of the blank verse, in detail. E. g.: How largely are the 
lines end-stopped (with a break in the sense at the end of each line, 
generally indicated by a mark of punctuation), how largely run-on 
(without such pause)? Is the rhythm pleasing, varied, or monot- 
onous? 6. Characterization and motivation. 

14. The Elizabethan Stage; Shakspere; and 'Richard II' as a 
Representative .Chronicle-History Play. Three days. Above, 
pages 129-140. The historical facts on which Richard II is based 
may be found in any short English history, years 1382-1399, 
though it must be remembered that Shakspere knew them only in 
the 'Chronicle' of Holinshed. In brief outline they are as follows: 
King Richard and Bolingbroke (pronounced by the Elizabethans 



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 369 

BullenbroTce) are cousins, grandsons of Edward III. Richard was 
a mere child when he came to the throne and after a while five 
lords, among whom were his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester (also 
called in the play Woodstock), and Bolingbroke, took control of 
the government. Later, Richard succeeded in recovering it and 
imprisoned Gloucester at Calais in the keeping pf Mowbray. There 
Gloucester was murdered, probably by Richard's orders. Accord- 
ing to Holinshed, whom Shakspere follows, Bolingbroke accuses 
Mowbray of the murder. (This is historically wrong; Boling- 
broke ; s charge was another, trumped-up, one; but that does not 
concern us.) Bolingbroke 's purpose is to fix the crime on Mow- 
bray and then prove that Mowbray acted at Richard's orders. 

The story of the play is somewhat similar to that of Marlowe's 
'Edward II,' from which Shakspere doubtless took his suggestion. 

Main matters to consider throughout are: The characters, espe- 
cially Richard and Bolingbroke; the reasons for their actions; do 
they change or develop? How far are the style and spirit like 
Marlowe; how far is there improvement? Is the verse more poetic 
or rhetorical? In what sorts of passages or what parts of scenes 
is rime chiefly used? Just what is the value of each scene in 
furthering the action, or for the other artistic purposes of the 
play? As you read, note any difficulties, and bring them up in 
the class. 

For the second day, read through Act III. Act I: Why did 
Richard, at first try to prevent the combat, then yield, and at 
the last moment forbid it? Are these changes significant, or im- 
portant in results? (The 'long flourish' at I, iii, 122, is a bit 
of stage symbolism, representing an interval of two hours in which 
Richard deliberated with his council.) 

For the third day, finish the play and write your discussion, 
which should consist of a very brief outline of the story and con- 
sideration of the questions that seem to you most important. Some, 
in addition to those above stated, are: How far is it a mere 
Chronicle-history play, how far a regular tragedy? Has it an 
abstract theme, like a tragedy? Are there any scenes which 
violate unity? Is there a regular dramatic line of action, with 
central climax? Does Shakspere indicate any moral judgment oh 
Bolingbroke 's actions? General dramatic power — rapidity in get- 
ting started, in movement, variety, etc.? Note how large a part 
women have in the play, and how large a purely poetic element 
there is, as compared with the dramatic. The actual historical 
time is about two years. Does it appear so long? 

15. 'Twelfth Night' as a Representative Romantic Comedy. 
Three days, with written discussion. In the Elizabethan period 
the holiday revelry continued for twelve days after Christmas; 
the name of the play means that it is such a one as might be used 
to complete the festivities. Helpful interpretation of the play is 
to be found in such books as: F. S. Boas, 'Shakspere and his 
Predecessors,' pp. 313 ff; Edward Dowden, ' Shakspere 's Mind 
and Art,' page 328; and Barrett Wendell, 'William Shakspere,' 
pp. 205 ff. Shakspere took the outline of the plot from a current 
story, which appears, especially, in one of the Elizabethan 'novels.' 



370 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Much of the jesting of the clown and others of the characters is 
mere light trifling, which loses most of its force in print to-day. 
The position of steward (manager of the estate) which Malvolio 
holds with Olivia was one of dignity and importance, though the 
steward was nevertheless only the chief servant. The unsympa- 
thetic presentation of Malvolio is of the same sort which Puritans 
regularly received in the Elizabethan drama, because of their 
opposition to the theater. Where is Illyria, and why does Shaks- 
pere locate the play there? 

First day: Acts I and II. 1. Make sure you can tell the story 
clearly. 2. How many distinct ' actions'? 3. Which one is chief? 
4. Why does Shakspere combine them in one play? 5. Which 
predominates, romance or realism? 6. Note specifically the im- 
probable incidents. 7. For what sorts of scenes are verse and 
prose respectively used? Poetic quality of the verse? 8. Charac- 
terize the main persons and state their relations to the others, 
or purposes in regard to them. Which set of persons is most 
distinctly characterized? 

Second day: The rest. (The treatment given to Malvolio was 
the regular one for madmen; it was thought that madness was 
due to an evil spirit, which must be driven out by cruelty.) 
Make sure of the story and characters as before. 9. How skilful 
are the interweaving and development of the actions? 10. How 
skilful the ' resolution' (straightening out) of the suspense and 
complications at the end? 11. Is the outcome, in its various de- 
tails, probable or conventional? 12. Is there ever any approach to 
tragic effect? 

Third day: Write your discussion, consisting of: I, A rather 
full outline of the story (in condensing you will do better not 
always to follow Shakspere 's order), and II, your main impres- 
sions, including some of the above points or of the following: 
13. How does the excellence of the characterization compare with 
that in 'Bichard II'? 14. Work out the time-scheme of the play 
— the amount of time which it covers, the end of each day repre- 
sented, and the length of the gaps to be assumed between these 
days. Is there entire consistency in the treatment of time? 15. 
Note in four parallel columns, two for the romantic action and 
two for the others together, the events in the story which respec- 
tively are and are not presented on the stage. 

16. 'Hamlet' as a Representative Tragedy. Four days, with 
written discussion. Students can get much help from good in- 
terpretative commentaries, such as: C. M. Lewis, 'The Genesis 
of Hamlet,' on which the theories here stated are partly based; 
A. C. Bradley, ' Shakspearean Tragedy,' pp. 89-174; Edward 
Dowden, 'Shakspere Primer,' 119 ff.; Barrett Wendell, 'William 
Shakspere,' 250 ff.; Georg Brandes, 'William Shakespeare,' one 
vol. ed., book II, chaps, xiii-xviii; F. S. Boas, 'Shakespeare and 
his Predecessors,' 384 ff.; S. T. Coleridge, 'Lectures on Shakspere,' 
including the last two or three pages of the twelfth lecture. 

The original version of the Hamlet story is a brief narrative 
in the legendary so-called 'Danish History,' written in Latin by 
the Dane Saxo the Grammarian about the year 1200. About 



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 371 

1570 this was put into a much expanded French form, still very 
different from Shakspere's, by the 'novelist' Belief orest, in his 
'Histoires Tragiques. ' (There is a translation of Belief orest in 
the second volume of the ' Variorum' edition of ' Hamlet'; also in 
Hazlitt's 'Shakespeare Library/ I, ii, 217 ff.) Probably on this 
was based an English play, perhaps written by Thomas Kyd, which 
is now lost but which seems to be represented, in miserably gar- 
bled form, in an existing text of a German play acted by English 
players in Germany in the seventeenth century. (This German 
play is printed in the 'Variorum' edition of 'Hamlet,' vol. II.) 
This English play was probably Shakspere's source. Shakspere's 
play was entered in the 'Stationers' Register' (corresponding to 
present-day copyrighting) in 1602, and his play was first pub- 
lished (the first quarto) in 1603. This is evidently only Shaks- 
pere's early tentative form, issued, moreover, by a piratical pub- 
lisher from the wretchedly imperfect notes of a reporter sent to 
the theater for the purpose. (This first quarto is also printed 
in the 'Variorum' edition.) The second quarto, virtually Shaks- 
pere's finished form, was published in 1604. Shakspere, therefore, 
was evidently working on the play for at least two or three years, 
during which he transformed it from a crude and sensational 
melodrama of murder and revenge into a spiritual study of char- 
acter and human problems. But this transformation could not be 
complete — the play remains bloody — and its gradual progress, as 
Shakspere's conception of the possibilities broadened, has left 
inconsistencies in the characters and action. 

It is important to understand the situation and events at the 
Danish court just before the opening of the play. In Saxo the 
time was represented as being the tenth century; in Shakspere, 
as usual, the manners and the whole atmosphere are largely those 
of his own age. The king was the elder Hamlet, father of Prince 
Hamlet, whose love and admiration for him were extreme. Prince 
Hamlet was studying at the University of Wittenberg in Ger- 
many; in Shakspere's first quarto it is made clear that he had 
been there for some years; whether this is the assumption in the 
final version is one of the minor questions to consider. Hamlet's 
age should also be considered. The wife of the king and mother 
of Prince Hamlet was Gertrude, a weak but attractive woman 
of whom they were both very fond. The king had a brother, 
Claudius, whom Prince Hamlet had always intensely disliked. 
Claudius had seduced Gertrude, and a few weeks before the play 
opens murdered King Hamlet in the way revealed in Act I. Of 
the former crime no one but the principals were aware; of the 
latter at most no one but Claudius and Gertrude; in the first 
quarto it is made clear that she was ignorant of it; whether that 
is Shakspere's meaning in the final version is another question 
to consider. After the murder Claudius got himself elected king 
by the Danish nobles. There was nothing illegal in this; the 
story assumes that as often in medieval Europe a new king might 
be chosen from among all the men of the royal family; but 
Prince Hamlet had reason to feel that Claudius had taken advan- 
tage of his absence to forestall his natural candidacy. The re- 



372 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

speet shown throughout the play by Claudius to Polonius, the 
Lord Chamberlain, now in his dotage, suggests that possibly Polo- 
nius was instrumental in securing Claudius' election. A very few 
weeks after the death of King Hamlet, Claudius married Ger- 
trude. Prince Hamlet, recalled to Denmark by the news of his 
father's death, was plunged into a state of wretched despondency 
by the shock of that terrible grief and by his mother's indecently 
hasty marriage to a man whom he detested. 

There has been much discussion as to whether or not Shakspere 
means to represent Hamlet as mad, but very few competent critics 
now believe that Hamlet is mad at any time. The student should 
discover proof of this conclusion in the play; but it should be 
added that all the earlier versions of the story explicitly state 
that the madness is feignsd. Hamlet's temperament, however, 
should receive careful consideration. The actual central ques- 
tions of the play are: 1. Why does Hamlet delay in killing King 
Claudius after the revelation by his father's Ghost in I iv? 2. Why 
does he feign madness? As to the delay: It must be premised 
that the primitive law of blood-revenge is still binding in Den- 
mark, so that after the revelation by the Ghost it is Hamlet's duty 
to kill Claudius. Of course it is dramatically necessary that he 
shall delay, otherwise there would be no play; but that is irrelevant 
to the question of the human motivation. The following are the 
chief explanations suggested, and students should carefully consider 
how far each of them may be true. 1. There are external dif- 
ficulties, a. In the earlier versions of the story Claudius was 
surrounded by guards, so that Hamlet could not get at him. Is 
this true in Shakspere 's play? b. Hamlet must wait until he can 
justify his deed to the court; otherwise his act would be misun- 
derstood r>.nd he might himself be put to death, and so fail of real 
revenge. Do you find indications that Shakspere takes this view? 
2. Hamlet is a sentimental weakling, incapable by nature of de- 
cisive action. This was the view of Goethe. Is it consistent with 
Hamlet's words and deeds? 3. Hamlet's scholar's habit of study 
and analysis has largely paralyzed his natural power of action. 
He must stop and weigh every action beforehand, until he be- 
wilders himself in the maze of incentives and dissuasives. 4. This 
acquired tendency is greatly increased by his present state of ex- 
treme grief and despondency. (Especially argued by Professor 
Bradley.) 5. His moral nature revolts at the idea of assassination; 
in him the barbarous standard of a primitive time and the finer 
feelings of a highly civilized and sensitive man are in conflict. 
6. He distrusts the authenticity of the Ghost and wishes to make 
sure that it is not (literally) a device of the devil before obeying 
it. Supposing that this is so, does it suffice for the complete ex- 
planation, and is Hamlet altogether sincere in falling back on it? 

In a hasty study like the present the reasons for Hamlet's pre- 
tense of madness can be arrived at only by starting not only with 
some knowledge of the details of the earlier versions but with 
some definite theory. The one which follows is substantially that 
of Professor Lewis. The pretense of madness was a natural part 
of the earlier versions, since in them Hamlet 'a uncle killed his 



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 373 

father openly and knew that Hamlet would naturally wish to 
avenge the murder; in those versions Hamlet feigns madness in 
order that he may seem harmless. In Shakspere 's play (and prob- 
ably in the older play from which he drew), Claudius does not 
know that Hamlet is aware of his guilt; hence Hamlet's pretense 
of madness is not only useless but foolish, for it attracts unneces- 
sary attention to him and if discovered to be a pretense must sug- 
gest that he has some secret plan, that is, must suggest to Claudius 
that Hamlet may know the truth. Shakspere, therefore, retains the 
pretense of madness mainly because it had become too popular a 
part of the story (which was known beforehand to most theater- 
goers) to be omitted. Shakspere suggests as explanations (motiva- 
tion) for it, first that it serves as a safety-valve for Hamlet's 
emotions (is this an adequate reason?); and second that he re- 
solves on it in the first heat of his excitement at the Ghost 's revela- 
tion (I, iv). The student should consider whether this second ex- 
planation is sound, whether at that moment Hamlet could weigh 
the whole situation and the future probabilities, could realize that 
he would delay in obeying the Ghost and so would need the 
shield of pretended madness. Whether or not Shakspere 's treat- 
ment seems rational on analysis the student should consider whether 
it is satisfactory as the play is presented on tbfe stage, which is 
what a dramatist primarily aims at. It should be remembered 
also that Shakspere 's personal interest is in the struggle in Ham- 
let's inner nature. 

Another interesting question regards Hamlet 's love for Ophelia. 
When did it begin? Is it very deep, so that, as some critics hold, 
when Ophelia fails him he suffers another incurable wound, or is 
it a very secondary thing as compared with his other interests? 
Is the evidence in the play sufficiently clear to decide these ques- 
tions conclusively? Is it always consistent? 

For the second day, study to the end of Act II. Suggestions on 
details (the line numbers are those adopted in the 'Globe' edition 
and followed in most others): I, ii: Notice particularly the dif- 
ference in the attitude of Hamlet toward Claudius and Gertrude 
respectively and the attitude of Claudius toward him. At the 
end of the scene notice the qualities of Hamlet's temperament 
and intellect. Scenes iv and v: Again notice Hamlet's tempera- 
ment, v, 107: The 'tables' are the waxen tablet which Hamlet 
as a student carries. It is of course absurd for him to write on 
them now; he merely does instinctively, in his excitement and 
uncertainty, what he is used to doing. 115-116: The falconer's 
cry to his bird; here used because of its penetrating quality. 149 ff.: 
The speaking of the Ghost under the floor is a sensational element 
which Shakspere keeps for effect from the older play, where it is 
better motivated — there Hamlet started to tell everything to his 
companions, and the Ghjst's cries are meant to indicate displeas- 
ure. II, ii,342; 'The city' is Wittenberg. What follows is a 
topical allusion to the rivalry at the time of writing between the 
regular men's theatrical companies and those of the boys. 

Third day, Acts III and IV. Ill, i, 100-101: Professor Lewis 
points out that these lines, properly placed in the first quarto, 



374 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

are out of order here, since up to this point in the scene Ophelia 
has reason to tax herself with unkindness, but none to blame Ham- 
let. This is an oversight of Shakspere in revising. Scene ii, Iff.: 
A famous piece of professional histrionic criticism, springing from 
Shakspere 's irritation at bad acting; of course it is irrelevant to 
the play. 95: Note 'I must be idle.' Scene iii: Does the device 
of the play of scene ii prove wise and successful, on the whole? 
73 ff.: Is Hamlet sincere with himself here? 

Fourth day: Finish the play and write your discussion. V, i: 
Why are the clowns brought into the play? ii, 283: A 'union' was 
a large pearl, here dissolved in the wine to make it more precious. 
In the old play instead of the pearl there was a diamond pounded 
fine, which constituted the poison. Why is Eortinbras included in 
the play? 

Your discussion should include a much condensed outline of the 
play, a statement of its theme and main meanings as you see 
them, and a careful treatment of whatever question or questions 
most interest you. In addition to those above suggested, the 
character of Hamlet is an attractive topic. 

17. The Rest of the Dramatists to 1642, and the Study of Jon- 
son's 'Sejanus.' Three days, with written discussion of 'Sejanus.' 
Above, pp. 141-150. Preliminary information about 'Sejanus:' Of 
the characters in the play the following are patriots, opposed to 
Sejanus: Agrippina, Drusus, the three boys, Arruntius, Silius, Sab- 
inus, Lepidus, Cordus, Gallus, Eegulus. The rest, except Macro and 
Laco, are partisans of Sejanus. In his estimate of Tiberius' char- 
acter Jonson follows the traditional view, which scholars now be- 
lieve unjust. Sejanus' rule actually lasted from 23-31 A. D.; Jon- 
son largely condenses. Livia Augusta, still alive at the time of 
the play, and there referred to as 'the great Augusta,' was mother 
of Tiberius and a Drusus (now dead) by a certain Tiberius Claudius 
Nero (not the Emperor Nero). After his death she married the 
Emperor Augustus, who adopted Tiberius and whom Tiberius has 
succeeded. The Drusus abova-mentioned has been murdered by 
Tiberius and Sejanus. By the Agrippina of the play Drusus was 
mother of the three boys of the play, Nero (not the Emperor), Dru- 
sus Junior, and Caligula (later Emperor). The Drusus Senior of 
the play is son of Tiberius. In reading the play do not omit the 
various introductory prose addresses, etc. (The collaborator whose 
part Jonson has characteristically displaced in the final form of 
the play may have been Shakspere.) 

For the second day, read through Act IV. Questions: 1. How 
far does Jonson follow the classical principles of art and the 
drama, general and special? 2. Try to formulate definitely the 
differences between Jonson 's and Shakspere 's method of pre- 
senting Eoman life, and their respective power and effects. Does 
Jonson J s knowledge interfere with his dramatic effectiveness? 
3. The characters. Why so many? How many are distinctly in- 
dividualized? Characterize these. What methods of characteri- 
zation does Jonson use? 4. Compare Jonson 's style and verse 
with Shakspere 's. 5. Effectiveness of III, 1? Is Tiberius sincere 
in saying that he meant to spare Silius? 



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 375 

For the third day, finish the reading and write your discussion. 
6. Excellence in general dramatic qualities, especially Movement, 
Suspense, Variety. Is the act-division organic? 7. State the theme. 
8. Locate the points in the line of action, especially the central 
climax. 9. Specific points of influence from Greek and Senecan 
tragedy. Begin your discussion with a summary of the story (but 
do not merely copy from Jonson's own preliminary 'argument'). 

18. Francis Bacon and his Essays. One day. Above, pp. 151- 
156. Eead half a dozen of the Essays, including those on Studies 
and Friendship. The numerous illustrations from classical history 
and literature were of course natural to Bacon and his readers. 
The main matters for consideration are suggested above. It 
would be interesting to state definitely, with illustrations, those 
characteristics of Bacon's mind which make it impossible that he 
should have written Shakspere's plays. Or you might compare 
and contrast his essays with others that you know, such as those 
of Emerson, Addison, Macaulay, or Lamb. 

19. The King James Bible. If circumstances permit any num- 
ber of hours may be devoted to the style of the Bible or its con- 
tents — literary form, narrative qualities or a hundred other topics. 
Comparison with the Wiclifite or other earlier versions is in- 
teresting. Above, pp. 156-157. 

20. The Seventeenth Century Minor Lyric Poets. Two days. 
Above, pages 157-164. Read as many as possible of the poems of 
the authors named. Consider the differences in subjects and tone 
between them and the Elizabethan poets on the one hand and the 
nineteenth century poets on the other. Form a judgment of their 
absolute poetic value. 

21. Milton. Above, pp. 164-170. Every one should be familiar 
with all the poems of Milton mentioned in the text. Suggested as- 
signments : 

One day. The shorter poems. In the ' Nativity Hymn, ' ' L 'Al- 
legro, ' and 'II Penseroso' note appeals to sight (especially light and 
color), sound, and general physical sensation, and cases of onoma- 
topoeia or especial adaptation of metrical movement to the sense. 
Of Lycidas write a summary outline, indicating thought-divisions 
by line numbers; state the theme; and consider Unity. Does the 
conventional pastoralism render the poem artificial or insincere? 
Respective elements of Classicism and Romanticism in the shorter 
poems'? 

Questions on 'Paradise Lost' are included in the present author's 
'Principles of Composition and Literature,' Part II, pages 204 ff. 
Perhaps the most important Books are I, II, IV, and VI. 

One of the most suggestive essays on Milton is that of Walter 
Bagehot. 

22. Bunyan and 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Above, pages 171-174. 
Many students will have read 'Pilgrim's Progress' as children, 
but most will gain by critical study of it. Perhaps two days may 
be devoted to Part I. Subjects for discussion, in addition to those 
above suggested: 1. The allegory. Compare with that of 'The 
Faerie Queene. ' 2. The style. Compare with the Bible and note 
words or expressions not derived from it. 3. Bunyan 's religion — 



376 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

how far spiritual, how far materialistic? 4. His personal qualities 
— sympathy, humor, etc. 5. His descriptions. Does he care for 
external Nature? Any influence from the Bible? 

23. The Restoration Period and Dryden. Above, Chapter VIII. 
One day. 

24. Dryden 's 'Alexander's Feast' and 'Absalom and Achito- 
phel,' Part I. How does the lyric quality of 'Alexander's Feast' 
compare with that of the best lyrics of more Eomantic periods? 
Compare 'Absalom and Achitophel' with the source in II Samuel, 
Chapter XIII, verse 23, to Chapter XVIII. 1. How cleverly is the 
ancient story applied to the modern facts? (The comparison of 
Charles II to David was not original with Dryden, but was a 
commonplace of the Court party. Of the minor characters: Ish- 
bosheth, line 58, is Eichard Cromwell; Zimri, 544 ff., the Duke of 
Buckingham; Corah, 632 ff., Titus Oates; Bathsheba, 710, the 
Duchess of Portsmouth; Barzillai, 817, the Duke of Ormond; 
Zadoc, 864, Archbishop Sancroft. The 'progress' of 729 ff. is that 
which Monmouth made in 1680 through the West of England. 
Who or what are the Jebusites, Egypt, Pharoah, and Saul?) 2. 
Power as a satire? 3. Qualities and effectiveness of the verse, 
as you see it. How regularly are the couplets end-stopped? 4. Is 
it real poetry? 

25. The Pseudo-Classic Period and Daniel Defoe, with study of 
Part I of 'Robinson Crusoe.' Three days. Above, pages 189-195, 
and in 'Eobinson Crusoe' as much as time allows. Better begin 
with Eobinson 's fourth voyage (in the 'Everyman' edition, page 
27). Consider such matters as: 1. The sources of interest. Does 
the book make as strong appeal to grown persons as to children, 
and to all classes of persons? 2. The use of details. Are there 
too many? Is there skilful choice? Try to discover some of the 
numerous inconsistencies which resulted from Defoe's haste and 
general manner of composition, and cases in which he attempts 
to correct them by supplementary statements. 3. The motivation. 
Is it always satisfactory? 4. Characterize Eobinson. The nature 
of his religion? How far is his character like that of Defoe him- 
self? 5. Success of the characterization of the other persons, espe- 
cially Friday? Does Defoe understand savages? 6. Narrative 
qualities. How far has the book a plot? Value of the first-personal 
method of narration? 7. The Setting. Has Defoe any feeling for 
Nature, or does he describe merely for expository purposes? 8. 
The style. 9. Defoe's nature as the book shows it. His sense of 
humor, pathos, etc. 10. Has the book a definite theme? 

26. Jonathan Swift. Two days. Above, pages 195-202. In 
the reading, a little of Swift's poetry should be included, espe- 
cially a part of 'On the Death of Dr. Swift'; and of the prose 'A 
Modest Proposal,' perhaps the 'Journal to Stella' (in brief selec- 
tions), 'A Tale of a Tub,' and 'Gulliver's Travels.' Of course 
each student should center attention on the works with which he 
has no adequate previous acquaintance. In 'The Tale of a Tub' 
better omit the digressions; read the Author's Preface (not the 
Apology), which explains the name, and sections 2, 4, 6, and 11. 
Subjects for discussion should readily suggest themselves. 



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 377 

27. Steele and Addison and the 'Spectator' Papers. Two days. 
Above, pages 202-208. Eead a dozen or more of the 'Spectator' 
papers, from the De Coverly papers if you are not already fa- 
miliar with them, otherwise others. Subjects: 1. The style. 
What gives it its smoothness — balance of clauses, the choice of 
words for their sound, or etc.? The relation of long and short 
sentences. 2. The moral instruction. How pervasive is it? How 
agreeable? Things chiefly attacked? 3. Customs and manners as 
indicated in the essays — entertainments, modes of traveling, social 
conventions, etc. 4. Social and moral standards of the time, espe- 
cially their defects, as attacked in the papers. 5. The use of 
humor. 6. Characterization in the De Coverly papers. Is the 
method general or detailed? Is there much description of personal 
appearance? Is characterization mostly by exposition, action or 
conversation? How clear are the characters? 7. Is Sir Eoger 
real or 'idealized'? 8. General narrative skill (not merely in 
the De Coverly papers). 9. How near do the De Coverly papers 
come to making a modern story? Consider the relative proportions 
of characterization, action, and setting. 10. Compare the 'Spec- 
tator' essays with any others with which you are familiar. 

28. Alexander Pope. The number of exercises may depend on 
circumstances. Above, pages 190-191 and 208-215. As many as 
possible of the poems named in the text (except 'The Dunciad') 
should be read, in whole or in part. 'An Essay on Criticism': (By 
'Nature' Pope means actual reality in anything, not merely ex- 
ternal Nature.) Note with examples the pseudo-classical qualities 
in: 1, Subject-matter. 2. The relation of intellectual and 
emotional elements. 3. The vocabulary and expression. 4. How 
deep is Pope's feeling for external Nature? 5. State his ideas on 
the relation of 'Nature,' the ancients, and modern poets; also on 
authority and originality. 6. In relation to his capacity for clear 
thought note in how many different senses he uses the word 'wit.' 
'The Eape of the Lock': Note the attitude toward women. Your 
opinion of its success? How far is it like, how far unlike, the 
'Essay on Criticism'? Was the introduction of the sylphs fortu- 
nate? Pope took them from current notions — books had been writ- 
ten which asserted that there was a fantastic sect, the Eosicrucians, 
who believed that the air was full of them. 'Eloisa to Abelard': 
(Abelard was a very famous unorthodox philosopher of the twelfth 
century who loved Helo'ise and was barbarously parted from her. 
Becoming Abbot of a monastery, he had her made Abbess of a 
convent. From one of the passionate letters which later passed 
between them and which it is interesting to read in comparison 
Pope takes the idea and something of the substance of the poem.) 
In your opinion does it show that Pope had real poetic emotion? 
Does the rimed pentameter couplet prove itself a possible poetic 
vehicle for such emotion? The translation of 'The Iliad': Com- 
pare with corresponding passages in the original or in the trans- 
lation of Lang, Leaf, and Myers (Macmillan). Just how does 
Pope's version differ from the original? How does it compare 
with it in excellence? The 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot': Note 
Pope's personal traits as they appear here. How do the satirical 



378 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

portraits and the poem in general compare with Dryden's ' Absalom 
and Aehitophel'? In general summary consider: Pope's spirit, his 
artistry, his comparative rank as a poet, and the merits and de- 
fects of the couplet as he employs it. 

29. Samuel Johnson. Two days. Above, pages 216-223. 'The 
Vanity of Human Wishes': How far does it illustrate the pseudo- 
classical characteristics (above, pages 190 and 215) and Johnson's 
own traits? How does it compare with Pope's poems in artistry 
and power? The prose reading should consist of or include the 
letter to Lord Chesterfield, a few essays from 'The Bambler,' one 
or more of the 'Lives of the Poets' and perhaps a part of 'Bas- 
selas. ' 1. The style, both absolutely and in comparison with pre- 
vious writers. Is it always the same? You might make a definite 
study of (a) the relative number of long and short words, (b) 
long and short and (c) loose and balanced sentences. 2. How far 
do Johnson's moralizing, his pessimism, and other things in his 
point of view and personality deprive his work of permanent in- 
terest and significance? 3. His skill as a narrator? 4. His merits 
and defects as a literary critic? 5. His qualifications and success 
as a biographer? 

30. Boswell and his 'Life of Johnson.' One day. Above, pages 
223-225. Eead anywhere in the 'Life' as much as time allows, 
either consecutively or at intervals. Your impression of it, abso- 
lutely and in comparison with other biographies? Boswell 's per- 
sonality. Note an interesting incident or two for citation in class. 

31. Gibbon and 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' 
One day. Above, pages 225-229. Eead a chapter or two in the 
history. Among the best chapters are numbers 1, 2, 3, 11, 14, 17, 
24, 26, 29, 30, 35, 39, 40, 44, 50, 52, 58, 59, 68. Questions for 
consideration are suggested above, such as: his power in exposition 
and narration; how his history compares with later ones; his 
style. 

32. Edmund Burke. Two days. Above, pages 229-236. Every 
one should be familiar with the speech 'On Conciliation with 
America.' The speeches at Bristol are among the briefest of 
Burke's masterpieces. Beyond these, in rapid study he may best 
be read in extracts. Especially notable are: 'Thoughts on the 
Present Discontents'; 'An Address to the King'; the latter half 
of the speech 'On the Nabob of Arcot's Debts'; 'Eeflections on the 
Eevolution in France'; 'A Letter to a Noble Lord.' Subjects for 
consideration are suggested by the text. It would be especially 
interesting to compare Burke's style carefully with Gibbon's and 
Johnson's. His technique in exposition and argument is another 
topic; consider among other points how far his order is strictly 
logical, how far modified for practical effectiveness. 

33. The Romantic Movement, Thomson, and Collins. One day. 
Above, pages 236-240. The reading may include extracts from 
Thomson and should include most of Collins' 'Odes.' The student 
should note specifically in Collins respective elements of classic, 
pseudo-classic, and romantic spirit, in general and in details. 

34. Gray, Goldsmith, Percy, Macpherson, and Chatterton. One 
day. Above, pages 240-247. The reading should include most 



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 379 

of Gray's poems and 'The Deserted Village.' Questions for con- 
sideration are suggested in the text, but students should be able 
to state definitely just what are the things that make Gray's 
' Elegy' a great poem and should form definite opinions as to the 
rank of 'The Bard' and 'The Progress of Poesy' among lyrics. 
These two poems are the best examples in English of the true 
Pindaric Ode as devised by the ancient Greeks. By them it 
was intended for chanting by dancing choruses. It always consists 
of three stanzas or some multiple of three. In each set of three 
the first stanza is called the strophe (turn), being intended, prob- 
ably, for chanting as the chorus moved in one direction; the second 
stanza is called the antistrophe, chanted as the chorus executed a 
second, contrasting, movement; and the third stanza the epode, 
chanted as the chorus stood still. The metrical structure of each 
stanza is elaborate (differing in different poems), but metrically 
all the strophes and antistrophes in any given poem must be ex- 
actly identical with each other and different from the epodes. The 
form is of course artificial in English, but the imaginative splendor 
and restrained power of expression to which it lends itself in skilful 
and patient hands give it especial distinction. Lowell declares 
that 'The Progress of Poesy' 'overflies all other English lyrics 
like an eagle,' and Mr. Gosse observes of both poems that the 
qualities to be regarded are ' originality of structure, the varied 
music of their balanced strophes, as of majestic antiphonal 
choruses, answering one another in some antique temple, and the 
extraordinary skill with which the evolution of the theme is ob- 
served and restrained.' 'The Progress of Poesy' allegorically 
states the origin of Poetry in Greece; expresses its power over 
all men for all emotions; and briefly traces its passage from Greece 
to Eome and then to England, with Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, 
and finally some poet yet to be. 'The Bard' is the imagined 
denunciatory utterance of a Welsh bard, the sole survivor from 
the slaughter of the bards made by Edward I of England on his 
conquest of Wales. The speaker foretells in detail the tragic his- 
tory of Edward's descendants until the curse is removed at the 
accession of Queen Elizabeth, who as a Tudor was partly of 
Welsh descent. 

35. Cowper, Blake, and Burns. One day. Above, pages 247-253. 
The reading should include a few of th$ poems of each poet, and 
students should note definitely the main characteristics of each, 
romantic and general. 

36. The Eighteenth Century Novel and Goldsmith's 'Vicar of 
Wakefield.' Above, pages 253-264. Most students will already 
have some acquaintance with 'The Vicar of Wakefield.' Eead 
again as much as time allows, supplementing and correcting your 
earlier impressions. Consider: 1. The relation of idealism, ro- 
mance, and reality. 2. Probability, motivation, and the use of 
accident. 3. The characterization. Characterize the main per- 
sons. 4. Narrative qualities, such as unity, suspense, movement. 
5. Is moralizing too prominent? 6. The style. 

37. Coleridge. One day. Above, pages 265-270. Read at least 
'Kubla Khan,' 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' and Part I of 



380 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

' Christabel. ' In 'Kubla Kahn' 'Xanadu' is Coleridge's form for 
'Xamdu, ' the capital of Kublai Khan in Purchas's Pilgrimage, 
which Coleridge was reading when he fell into the sleep in which 
he wrote the poem. Coleridge said (though he is not to be trusted 
explicitly) that he composed the poem, to a length of over 200 
lines, without conscious effort; that on awaking he wrote down 
what has been preserved; that he was then called out on an errand; 
and returning after an hour he could recollect only this much. Hovv 
far do you agree with Swinburne's judgment: 'It is perhaps the 
most wonderful of all poems. We seem rapt into that paradise 
revealed to Swedenborg, where music and color and perfume were 
one, where you could hear the hues and see the harmonies of heaven 
For absolute melody and splendor it were hardly rash to call it 
the first poem in the language. An exquisite instinct marriec 
to a subtle science of verse has made it the supreme model o: 
music in our language, unapproachable except by Shelley.' Ii 
all the poems consider: 1. Is his romantic world too remot< 
from reality to be interesting, or has it poetic imagination thai 
makes it true in the deepest sense? 2. Which is more important 
the romantic atmosphere, or the story? 3. How important a par 
do description or pictures play? Are the descriptions minute o 
impressionistic? 4. Note some of the most effective onomatopoei 
passages. What is the main meaning or idea of 'The AncieD 
Mariner'? With reference to this, where is the central climax o' 
the story? Try to interpret 'Christabel.' 

38. Wordsworth. Two days. Above, pages 270-277. Eead s 
many as time allows of his most important shorter poems. You 
impressions about: 1. His Nature poems. 2. His ideas of th 
relation of God, Nature, and Man. 3. The application of h: 
theory of simple subjects and simple style in his poems — its coi 
sistency and success. 4. His emotion and sentiment. 5. H: 
poems in the classical style. 6. His political and patriotic sonnet 
7. His power as philosopher and moralizer. 8. His rank as 
poet. For the last day write a clear but brief outline in declar: 
tive statements, with references to stanza numbers, of the ' Ode c 
Intimations of Immortality.' What is its theme? 

39. Southey, Scott, and Byron. Two days, with discussion < 
Byron. Above, pages 277-288. No reading is here assigned : 
Southey or Scott, because Southey is of secondary importance ar 
several of Scott's works, both poems and novels, are probafr 
familiar to most students. Of Byron should be read part of tl 
third and fourth cantos of ' Childe Harold ' and some of the lyr 
poems. Subjects for discussion are suggested in the text. Esp 
dally may be considered his feeling for Nature, his power of d 
scription, and the question how far his faults as a poet nullii 
his merits. 

40. Shelley. Two days. Above, pages 288-294. The readir 
should include the more important lyric poems. 1. Does his r 
mantic world attract you, or does it seem too unreal? 2. No' 
specific cases of pictures, appeals to various senses, and melody. 
Compare or contrast his feeling for Nature and his treatment < 
Nature in his poetry with that of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, < 



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 381 

Byron. Eead 'Adonais' last and include in your report an outline 
of it in a, dozen or two sentences, with references to stanza num- 
bers. The outline should indicate the divisions of the poems and 
should make the thought-development clear. (The poem imitates 
the Greek elegies, of which the earliest now preserved was the 
Lament by Bion for Adonis, the mythological youth beloved by 
Venus. Shelley seems to have invented the name 'Adonais' (stand- 
ing for 'Keats') on analogy with ' Adonis.' Stanzas 17, 27-29, and 
36-38 refer to the reviewer of Keats' poems in 'The Quarterly Ee- 
view.' In stanza 30 'The Pilgrim of Eternity' is Byron and the 
poet of Ierne (Ireland) is Thomas Moore. 231 ff: the 'frail Form' 
is Shelley himself. 

41. Keats. One day. Above, pages 294-298. Eead 'The Eve 
of St. Agnes,' the 'Ode to a Nightingale,' 'Ode to a Grecian Urn,' 
and others of the shorter poems. 1. Note definitely for citation in 
class passages of strong appeal to the various senses and of beauti- 
ful melody and cadence. 2. Just what are the excellences of 'The 
Eve of St. Agnes'? Is it a narrative poem? 3. Consider classical 
and romantic elements in the poems. 

42. The Characteristics of the Victorian Period, and Macaulay. 
Two days, with written discussion of Macaulay. Above, pages 
299-309. Eead either (1) one of the essays, for example that on 
Clive or Bacon or Pitt or Chatham or Warren Hastings, or (2) a 
chapter in the History. Good chapters for the purpose are: 3, 5, 
8, 15, 16, 20, 25. The following topics may be used for written dis- 
cussions, or may be assigned to individual students for oral reports 
in class. Oral reports should be either written out in full and read 
or given from notes; they should occupy five or ten minutes each 
and may include illustrative quotations. 1. The effect of Macau- 
lay's self-confidence and dogmatism on the power of his writing 
and on the reader's feeling toward it. 2. His power in ex- 
position; e. g., the number and concreteness of details, the power 
of selection, emphasis, and bringing out the essentials. 3. Struc- 
ture, including Unity, Proportion, Movement. 4. Traits of style; 
e. g., use of antithesis and figures of speech; sentence length and 
balance. 5. How far does his lack of Idealism injure his work? 
Has he the power of appealing to the grand romantic imagination? 
6. His power in description. 7. Power as a historian. Compare 
him with other historians. 

43. Carlyle. Two days. Above, pages 309-314. Unless you are 
already familiar with 'Sartor Eesartus' read in it Book II, chap- 
ters 6-9, and also if by any means possible Book III, chapters 5 
and 8. Otherwise read in 'Heroes and Hero-Worship' or 'The 
French Eevolution. ' (The first and third books of 'Sartor Ee- 
sartus' purport to consist of extracts from a printed book of 
Teufelsdrockh, with comments by Carlyle; the second book out- 
lines Teufelsdrockh's (Carlyle 's) spiritual autobiography.) In 
'Sartor Eesartus': 1. Make sure that you can tell definitely the 
precise meaning of The Everlasting No, The Center of Indiffer- 
ence, and The Everlasting Yea. Look up, e. g. in 'The Century 
Dictionary,' all terms that you do not understand, such as 'Bapho- 
metic Fire-Baptism.' 2. Your general opinion of his style? 3. 



382 A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Note definitely its main peculiarities in (a) spirit; (b) vocabulary 
and word forms; (c) grammar and rhetoric. 

44. Ruskin. Two days. Above, pages 314-319. Most conven- 
ient for the purposes of this study is Tinker's ' Selections from 
Buskin' (Eiverside Literature Series). Everything there is worth 
while; but among the best passages are 'The Throne,' page 
138, and 'St. Mark's,' page 150; while pages 20-57 are rather more 
technical than the rest. Among Euskin's complete works 'Sesame 
and Lilies,' 'The Crown of Wild Olives,' and 'Praeterita' are as 
available and characteristic as any. Subjects for written or oral 
reports: 1. His temperament and his fitness as a critic and 
teacher. 2. His style — eloquence, rhythm, etc. 3. His power of 
observation. 4. His power in description. Consider both his sen- 
sitiveness to sense-impressions and his imagination. 5. His ex- 
pository power. 6. His ideas on Art. How far are they sound"? 
(In the ' Selections ' there are relevant passages on pages 164, 200, 
and 233.) 7. His religious ideas. How far do they change with 
time? 8. His ideas on modern political economy and modern life. 
How far are they reasonable? (Perhaps 'Munera Pulveris' or 
' Unto This Last ' states his views as well as any other one of his 
works.) 9. Compare with Carlyle in temperament, ideas, and use- 
fulness. 

45. Matthew Arnold. Three days. Above, pages 319-325. The 
poems read should include 'Sohrab and Eustum' and a -number of 
the shorter ones. The discussion of the poems may treat: The 
combination in Arnold of classic and romantic qualities; distin- 
guishing traits of emotion and expression; and, in 'Sohrab and 
Eustum,' narrative qualities. If you are familiar with Homer, 
consider precisely the ways in which Arnold imitates Homer's 
style. Of the prose works best read 'Culture and Anarchy,' at 
least the introduction (not the Preface), chapters 1, 3, 4 and 5, and 
the Conclusion. Otherwise read from the essays named in the text 
or from Professor L. E. Gates' volume of Selections from Arnold. 
Consider more fully any of the points treated above. If you read 
the 'Essays on Translating Homer' note the four main qualities 
which Arnold finds in Homer's style. 

46. Tennyson. Two days. Above, pages 325-329. Special at- 
tention may be given to any one, or more, of the statements or 
suggestions in the text, considering its application in the poems 
read, with citation of illustrative lines. Or consider some oi 
the less simple poems carefully. E. g., is 'The Lady of Shalott'' 
pure romance or allegory? If allegory, what is the meaning! 
Outline in detail the thought-development of 'The Two Voices.- 1 
Meaning of such poems as 'Ulysses' and 'Merlin and the Gleam'! 

47. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Twc 
days. Above, pages 329-335. In general consider the applicatior 
of the statements in the text; and in the case of Eobert Brown 
ing consider emotional, dramatic, descriptive, and narrative power 
poetic beauty, and adaptation of the verse-form to the substance 
Interpret the poems as carefully as possible; discussions may con 

ist, at least in part, of such interpretations. 

48. Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Above, pages 335-341 



ASSIGNMENTS FOR STUDY 383 

Students might compare and contrast the poetry of these three 
men, either on the basis of points suggested in the text or other- 
wise. 

From this point on, the time and methods available for the 
study are likely to vary so greatly in different classes that it 
seems not worth while to continue these suggestions. 



INDEX 



Addison, Joseph, 204 //., 376 

Alfred, King, 39 

' Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The, ' 

39, 45 
Arnold, Matthew, 319 ff., 382 
Austen, Jane, 263 

Bacon, Francis, 151 //., 375 
Ballads, Popular, Origin, 32 

Discussion, 74 //., 367 
Barnes, Barnabe, 118 
Beaumont, Francis, 148 
Bede, 38 

< Beowulf,' 34 //., 365 
Bible, the, Versions of, 100 

King James Bible, 156, 375 

Bevised Version, 157 
Blackmore, Richard, 356 
'Blackwood's Magazine,' 266 
Blake, William, 248, 379 
Boswell, James, 223 //., 378 
Breton, Nicholas, 118 
Bronte, Charlotte, Emily, and 

Anne, 342 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 157 
Browne, William, 158 
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 329 

//., 382 
Browning, Bobert, 329 //., 382 
Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Edward, 341 
Bunyan, John, 170 //., 375 
Burbage, James, 132 
Burke, Edmund, 229 //., 378 
Burney, Frances, 262 
Burns, Bobert, 249 //., 379 
Burton, Bobert, 157 
Butler, Samuel, 178 
Byron, Lord, 283 //., 380 

Caedmon, 37 
Campbell, Thomas, 298 
Campion, Thomas, 158 
Carew, Thomas, 161 
Carlyle, Thomas, 308 //., 381 



Caxton, William, 80, 367 
Chapman, George, 147 
Characters in Literature, 15 
Chatterton, Thomas, 246 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 62 //., 367 
Chronicle-History Play, The, 124 
Classicism denned, 20 
Clough, A. H., 341 
Coffee-houses, 178 
Coleridge, S. T., 266 //., 379 
Collier, Jeremy, 187 
Collins, William, 239, 378 
Congreve, William, 187 
Cowley, Abraham, 164 
Cowper, William, 247, 379 
Crashaw, Bichard, 162 
Criticism, Kinds of, 12 
'Cursor Mundi, ' The, 50 
Cynewulf, 38 



Daniel, Samuel, 118 
Davenant, Sir William, 181 
Davison, Francis, 118 
Defoe, Daniel, 192 ff., 376 
Deists, The, 212, n. 
Dekker, Thomas, 118, 148 
De Quincey, Thomas, 298 
De Morgan, William, 362 
Descriptive Power in Literature, 

17 
Dickens, Charles, 343 //. 
Disraeli, Benjamin, 341 /. 
Donne, John, 119 //. 
Drama, Structure of, 16 
Medieval, 82 //., 367 
Of the Restoration, 179 
Dramatic Power in Literature, 

15 
Drayton, Michael, 158 
Drummond, William, of Haw- 

thornden, 158 
Dryden, John, 179 //., 376 
Dyer, Sir Edward, 118 



385 



386 



INDEX 



Edgeworth Maria, 263 
'Edinburgh Eeview, The,' 266 
'Eliot, George,' 351 ff. 
Emotion in Literature, 13 
Epic Poetry, Origin, 33 
Etherege, Sir George, 187 
Evelyn, John, 179 

Eancy in Literature, 14 
Farquhar, George, 187 
Fielding, Henry, 257 //. 
Fitzgerald, Edward, 341 
Fletcher, John, 148, 159 
Ford, John, 149 
Form in Literature, 11 
Froude, J. A., 361 

'Gammer Gurton's Needle,' 122 
Gascoigne, George, 118 
Gaskell, Mrs. E. C, 343 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 55 //. 
Gibbon, Edward, 225 //., 378 
Gildas, 54 

Godwin, William, 262 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 242 //., 261, 

378, 379 
Gower, John, 69 
Gray, Thomas, 240, 378 
Green, J. E., 361 
Greene, Eobert, 108, 126 

Hardy, Thomas, 357 
Hazlitt, William, 298 
Herbert, George, 161 
Herrick, Eobert, 159 
Heywood, Thomas, 148 
Hume, David, 226 
Hunt, Leigh, 294 

Idealism in Literature, 14 
Imagination in Literature, 13 
Intellect in Literature, 13 
Interludes, 90 

James I of Scotland and ' The 

King's Quair, ' 74 
Johnson, Samuel, 216 //., 378 
Jonson, Ben, 142 //., 158, 374 

Keats, John, 294 //., 381 
Kingsley, Charles, 354 



Kipling, Eudyard, 360 
Kyd, Thomas, 126 

Laghamon, 57 
Lamb, Charles, 298 
Landor, W. S., 298 
Lecky, W. E. H., 362 
Lee, Nathaniel, 187 
Liturgical Plays, 84 /. 
Lodge, Thomas, 108, 118 
Lovelace, Col. Eichard, 161 
Lyly, John, 106, 118, 125 

Macaulay, Lord, 303 //., 381 
Macpherson, James, 246 
Malory, Sir Thomas, 77 //., 367 
'Mandeville, Sir John,' 61 
Marlowe, Christopher, 118, 126 

//., 368 
Marston, John, 148 
Marvell, Andrew, 164 
Masefield, John, 362 
Massinger, Philip, 149 
Maurice, F. D., 354 
Meredith, George, 356 
Meter defined, 20 
Middleton, Thomas, 148 
Milton, John, 164 //., 375 
Mitford, Mary E., 298 
Morality Plays, 89, 367 
Moore, Thomas, 298 
More, Sir Thomas, 98 //. 
Morris, William, 338, 382 
Mystery Plays, 84 //., 367 

Narrative, Structure, 16 

Other qualities, 17 
Nash, Thomas, 118 
Nature in Literature, 18 
Nennius, 54 

Newman, Cardinal J. H., 301 
Norton, Thomas, 123 
Novel, The, 253 //. 
Noyes, Alfred, 362 

Objectivity in Literature, 12 
Onomatopoeia, 19 
Ossianic Poems, The, 246 
Otway, Thomas, 187 

Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure,' 

106 
Pater, Walter, 356 



INDEX 



387 



Peacock, T. L., 298 

Peele, George, 118, 126 

Pepys, Samuel, 179 

Percy, Bishop Thomas, 245, 378 

Picaresque fiction, 108 

' Piers the Plowman, The Vision 

Concerning/ 70 
Poetry, Qualities and Kinds, 19 
Pope, Alexander, 208 //., 377 
Porter, Jane, 261 
Pre-Kaphaelite Movement, The, 

335 

Quarles, Francis, 163 
'Quarterly Eeview, The,' 266 

Eadcliffe, Mrs. Ann, 261 
Ealegh, Sir Walter, 118 
Eeade, Charles, 355 
Eealism in Literature, 14 
Reformation, The, 96 ff. 
Eenaissance, The, 92 ff., 368 
Ehythm defined, 20 
Eichardson, Samuel, 254 ff. 
Eime defined, 20 
Bobertson, William, 226 
Eomance in Literature, 14 
Eomances, Medieval, 52 ff. 
Eomanticism defined, 20 
Eomantic Movement, The, 236 

//., 378 
Eossetti, Christina, 341 
Eossetti, Dante G., 335 //., 382 
Euskin, John, 314 ff. } 382 

Saekville, Thomas, 123 
Scott, Walter, 277 ff., 380 
Seneca, Plays, Their influence, 

123 
Sentimental Comedy, 243 
Seven Deadly Sins, The, 49 
Shakspere, William, Sonnets, 119 
Life and Plays, 134 //., 368 

ff. 
Shelley, P. B., 288 ff., 380 
Sheridan, E. B., 244 
Shirley, James, 149 
Shorthouse, J. H., 356 



Sidney, Sir Philip, 107, 119 
'Sir Gawain and the Green 

Knight,' 57, 366 
Smollett, Tobias, 260 
Southey, Eobert, 277, 380 
Southwell, Eobert, 118 
Spenser, Edmund, 108 ff., 368 
Steele, Sir Eichard, 202 //., 376 
Sterne, Laurence, 260 
Stevenson, E. L., 358 
Structure in Literature, 16 
Style, 19 
Subjectivity, 12 
Substance in Literature, 11 
Suckling, Sir John, 161 
Surrey, Earl of, 103 
Swift, Jonathan, 195 //., 376 
Swinburne, A. C, 339, 382 
Sylvester, Joshua, 118 

Taylor, Jeremy, 157 
Tennyson, Alfred, 325 ff., 382 
Thackeray, W. M., 348 ff. 
Theater, The Elizabethan, 129 

/A 

Thomson, James, 238, 378 
'Totters Miscellany,' 104 
Trollope, Anthony, 355 

Udall, Nicholas, 122 

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 187 
Vaughan, Henry, 163 
Verse defined, 20 

Waller, Edmund, 164 

Walpole, Horace, 261 

Walton, Izaak, 157 

Webster, John, 149 

Wiclif, John, and the Wiclifite 

Bible, 72 
Wither, George, 161 
Wordsworth, William, 270 //., 

380 
Wotton, Sir Henry, 158 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 101 //. 
Wycherley, William, 187 



*T 



Other Books by Robert H. Fletcher 

A Brief Shaksperean Glossary, Grammar, and 
Booklet of Other Information. 90 pages. Boards 40c, 
stiff paper 30c. The Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 

Tennyson and Browning, a Manual for College 
Classes and Other Students. 258 pages. Cloth, $1.10. 
The Torch Press. 

Principles of Composition and Literature, for 
Students and Readers of English. Cloth, 515 pages. 
$2.00. The A. S. Barnes Company. 

Also to be had in Parts, as follows: 
Part I. Composition. Cloth, 160 pages . . . $1.00 
Pari II. Literature. Cloth, 335 pages .... 1.50 
In Sections, bound in boards, as follows: 

Section I. Composition. Chapters 1 to 5 

Elementary Matters and Exposition and Argument .35 

Section II. Composition. Chapters 6 and 7 

Description and Narration 25 

Section III. Literature. Chapter 1 

The Meaning of Literature 25 

Section IV. Literature. Chapters 1 to 5 

General Principles of Literature 35 

Section V. Literature. Chapters 6 and 7 

The Principles of Narration 35 

Section VI. Literature. Chapter 8 

The Drama 25 

Section VII. Literature. Chapters 9 and 10 
Poetry 35 




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